Federal Government-Funded Initiative | Ongoing Engagement | 2025–2027
Context
An emerging technology firm specializing in complex business transformation engaged Myndful Planet Inc. to design and deliver a bespoke, company-wide coaching and culture program. The firm, professionals ranging from early-career contributors to seasoned executives with decades of global enterprise experience, was at a critical inflection point, moving beyond start-up status and building a comprehensive scale-up strategy.
The firm’s leadership recognized early that sustainable growth depended not just on technical capability but on culture as a strategic asset. With a founder who had led complex international enterprise transformations over a 40-year career, the organization came to this work with both the conviction and the sophistication to invest meaningfully in it.
The Challenge
The leadership team identified four interconnected cultural goals that would need to be addressed simultaneously for the scale-up strategy to succeed:
- Building a high-performance, client-focused workplace that was diverse and empowering
- Creating an environment where emerging leaders felt both supported and challenged to grow beyond their immediate responsibilities
- Shifting the senior team from doing to leading; coaching emerging talent to execute, rather than remaining the sole drivers of output
- Establishing a values-driven community culture where every employee felt heard and valued, and where clients and partners could tangibly experience the firm’s culture in every interaction
These goals required more than a standalone training initiative. They called for an integrated, sustained program that could operate at the individual, team, and organizational level simultaneously, and evolve as the firm grew.
The Approach
Working closely with the firm’s leadership, Myndful Planet designed and delivered a multi-layered coaching and culture program built around five integrated components. The program was designed from the outset to become self-sustaining, embedded into the firm’s weekly management system rather than existing as a parallel initiative.
Executive Coaching
Recognizing that any culture transformation must be visibly leader-led, Myndful Planet established a weekly executive coaching rhythm with the firm’s founder and CEO. Each session followed a structured three-part format: assessing how the leader perceived the organization’s progress against its strategic goals; examining specific transformation dynamics that had emerged in the preceding week; and identifying tools, events, or programs that could maintain momentum across the broader team.
This ongoing executive coaching relationship provided the firm’s leadership with a consistent, confidential space for reflection and strategic recalibration, and ensured that the culture program remained connected to real business conditions rather than operating in isolation.
Coach-on-Call™
Coach-on-Call™ is a Myndful Planet innovation that makes bespoke, confidential coaching accessible to every member of an organization, not just its senior leaders. At this firm, Coach-on-Call™ was made available to all employees through a private coaching calendar that team members could access independently and at their own initiative.
The program was designed with strict confidentiality as a non-negotiable: the leadership team had no access to scheduling data, session content, or outcomes. Each engagement began with a brief orientation to help the coach understand the employee’s context, then proceeded entirely on the employee’s terms, topics, pace, and focus chosen by the participant.
After nearly two years, Coach-on-Call™ had become a defining feature of the firm’s culture. Usage patterns varied, some employees engaged weekly, others checked in as needed; but the response was consistently strong. Employees cited it as a meaningful reason for their long-term commitment to the organization.
Core Strengths Assessment and Team Facilitation
Myndful Planet facilitated the organization-wide administration of the SDI 2.0 (Strengths Deployment Inventory), a validated psychometric assessment that maps each individual’s core motivations, strengths, and conflict patterns, and visualizes how these show up differently depending on conditions. As a certified SDI Core Strengths evaluator and facilitator, Myndful Planet led a full-day facilitated team session in which employees explored their own results alongside those of their colleagues.
The session gave the team a shared language for understanding each other’s motivations and behaviours, particularly under pressure, and surfaced important insights about interpersonal dynamics and team communication. The SDI platform’s mobile application made these insights accessible and actionable in day-to-day interactions well beyond the session itself.
Coaching Culture Development
To embed coaching as a way of working rather than a program to participate in, Myndful Planet facilitated a full-day workshop for the entire team focused on coaching skills, listening techniques, and communication approaches that could be applied in everyday leadership and peer interactions. Through interactive exercises and role-play, team members developed practical skills for holding coaching-oriented conversations, with colleagues, with clients, and across the leadership hierarchy.
This work became an ongoing professional development initiative, progressively strengthening the firm’s internal capacity to coach, listen, and lead more effectively.
Coaching-Aligned Values Development
With the coaching program established and the Core Strengths framework providing a shared organizational lens, the team was ready to collaborate on a fresh set of company values. Myndful Planet facilitated this process, guiding the team through honest discussion of the organization’s strengths and development areas, incorporating client feedback, and helping team members articulate what aspects of the firm’s culture made them feel genuinely part of something meaningful.
Four core values emerged through a process of team consensus, external testing with trusted clients and partners, and iterative refinement. Myndful Planet then facilitated a final session to help the team translate those values into conversational language, specific phrases that could be used naturally in meetings and interactions driven by the firm’s management system at all levels.
Results
The program’s impact was evident across multiple dimensions of the organization:
- A sustained, multi-year coaching engagement embedded into the firm’s weekly management rhythm; not a one-time intervention
- Company-wide participation in the Core Strengths assessment, resulting in a shared team language for strengths, motivations, and conflict awareness
- A coaching culture initiative that progressively built internal leadership and communication capability across the team
- Four co-created company values developed through an inclusive, evidence-informed process and integrated into everyday organizational life
- Coach-on-Call™ adopted as a permanent feature of the firm’s employee offering, with consistent engagement across seniority levels
- Employees citing coaching access as a direct factor in their intention to remain with the organization long-term
What Made the Difference
The most significant factor in this program’s success was integration. Rather than delivering coaching as a standalone service, Myndful Planet designed a program where each component reinforced the others, executive coaching informed the culture strategy, the Core Strengths assessment deepened the coaching conversations, the values work built on the team’s shared self-awareness, and Coach-on-Call™ made the benefits of coaching accessible to every level of the organization.
The result was a culture program that became part of how the firm operates — not something done alongside the business, but woven into it. Two years in, the program continued to evolve and expand, with the firm’s leadership and employees actively shaping its direction.
“At a recent company dinner, attended by all team members, an employee spontaneously asked if they might lead a reflection on the year. By the end, almost everyone had participated, speaking about the culture emerging at the firm: one that encourages community, performance, and excellence.”
Program delivered by Myndful Planet Inc. Client, individual, and location details have been generalized to protect confidentiality.