As a 168-year-old legacy brand in the retail industry, Levi has survived and thrived through adversity through resilient, agile, creative, and spirited leadership, and there was a need to cascade and reinvigorate these values into new markets during a time of growth and acute crisis. In 2019, Levi Strauss’ global leadership team built the first Beacon Flagship store in Wuhan, China. In the face of a rising global pandemic and the extraordinary challenges that come with it, this also meant that mental fitness and organizational health were imperative to sustaining growth and emerging stronger.
Levi Strauss & Co. appointed CorporateDNA to deliver an intense and intimately engaged leadership development and executive coaching programme across 2018-2020. The burning platform was in integrating a reconfigured Greater China LT under the leadership of a new MD, building trust and collaboration while unlearning siloed and pressure-based ways of working, and fighting through a fragmented and “split” team culture, and navigating uncertainties with courage and care.
Concurrently, Levi Strauss China also suffered from a reputation as a ‘dark market,’ rather than a winning team. Despite the leadership team’s keen development of strategy, there was an even greater need to build resilience, courage, trust, and credibility in the leadership team, to unleash the growth of the market.
In partnership CorporateDNA was deeply involved in activating inclusive, collaborative, and trust-centric behaviours that were much needed for the Greater China LT, to breathe strategy and execution to life through motivation and trust, and managing interferences, such as limiting beliefs and egos. Fundamentally CorporateDNA helped them define what winning would look like and what it would take and broke it down into tangible ways of ‘just doing it’.
As a result, 36 leaders in the China leadership team were able to directly apply their learnings from the program and saw increased performance and motivation in their team members. CorporateDNA acted and allies and coaches through this personal and organizational development journey, where these leaders were inspired to be catalysts in shaping organizational culture and behaviours: