Pain
As an 80 year old company, it needs to continue to grow leaders within its organization. Over the years, future leaders were grown within functional organizations such as sales, finance, engineering or manufacturing. When they were promoted to senior positions, they had a somewhat myopic view of the business, because they had not been exposed to aspects of the business outside of their organizations. This makes it difficult to build consensus at the leadership level.

Vision
In 2009, the company introduced a cross-department leadership development program. Future leaders are identified early in their careers and asked to participate in the program with peers from other organizations. During the year a group is brought together and asked to identify and solve key problems within the company. The organizers of the leadership development program had a vision that the participants in the program would collaborate on a continual basis through a social-media style web site.

Value
Being able to continually collaborate would create bonds between the future leaders that they would not otherwise have. Using technology to foster this collaboration ensured that the team would be able to stay together as an ad-hoc group even after their year ended.

Solution
MPS Partners developed a SharePoint collaboration site for the company that helped foster ongoing collaboration. The collaboration site allows people on the team to:
- Share ideas through a structured threaded discussions and wikis
- Manage projects through shared project plans and timelines
- Plan activities through a shared calendar
- Collaborate on the development of documents that are used for projects and used to communicate to the greater organization on initiatives and updates
- Share personal information such as pictures and stories with the rest of the leadership team.