ITONICS is a software company specializing in innovation. Their platform is adopted by some of the most admired brands and organizations worldwide as the operating system for strategy, innovation, and growth. As the company grew, ITONICS’ CEO, Christian Mühlroth, wanted to help the leadership team reach the next level.

In Christian’s words, “We needed someone to train our leaders. To give them a toolbox and a lot of actionable, pragmatic, and effective tools they can then deploy.”

Having gone from a start-up to a grown-up company, ITONICS was putting a lot of emphasis on creating products and getting them to market. But Christian could see the leaders need to adapt to the rapidly growing and changing organization.

ITONICS had no framework. Leaders were doing things their own way and there was a lack of cohesion. Everyone was focused on getting the work done, but Christian knew “leading other people was the more critical thing for growth.

From the start, Christian and the other leaders quickly improved their skills on leadership tactics and methods, interpersonal tactics, communication strategies, and much more. By the second half of the four-month engagement, all the pieces came together and the leaders could see exactly how to put all their new skills to work.

Their toolboxes were now stocked with all the tools they needed to be strong, effective leaders. Not only did they have the tools, but they also knew just how and when to use them.

One outcome of the engagement with BOxD was the tearing down of functional silos. Previously, product managers were designing and engineers were implementing, but working too separately to be truly effective.

As Christian put it, “We tore down those intra-organizational silos by aligning the leaders of those functions with each other and re-emphasizing that they are working on the same thing. They are looking at it from different perspectives, but everybody’s heading towards the same goal.”

Christian went on to say, “At the same time, reshaping the communication of the vision and the strategy we have all together gives a lot more speed. We now have the entire team moving in one direction. It was a very powerful outcome.”

I myself have become a true advocate of the leadership toolbox that has been made available to us. Whenever I discover a new tool, I conceptualize it, adapt it to us, include it in my own toolbox, and then pass it on to leaders. That concept is very powerful and continuously helps us to reach the next level.