Strider Digital – Shaping potential to build a winning team

Strider Digital’s management team transformed into a unit of strong leaders driving growth of 70% year-on-year .

Strider Digital’s management team has transformed into a unit of strong leaders. They’re improving their execution scores quarter on quarter, increasing the volume of their tech talent placements, owning their roles in the company’s year-on-year growth of 70%, and they truly live Strider’s core purpose in ‘walking the journey’ with their clients and making change happen.

Strider is steadily moving towards achieving its Big Hairy Audacious Goals, and yet CEO and Founder Annabel Dallamore says she will never stop the coaching process. Here’s why.

Annabel founded Strider in 2014. One of the top females in Africa’s tech industry, she nurtured the company from start-up to a pivotal growth phase and has since been able to hire and outsource some of the brightest digital talents to accelerate digital transformation across all industries.

In 2021, during the initial growth phase of her business, Annabel turned to Grow to coach her team to new heights. It was time to make structural changes in the business and formulate better processes and systems that would allow for scalability, but Annabel also wanted the heads of the various divisions to take full ownership of their roles and sharpen their strategic and critical thinking.

When Grow matched the Strider team with their business coach, Annabel says it had an incredibly positive effect. “You’ve got to find the right coach, someone who fits into your business and your culture, who can draw out the key messages and then implement the feedback in a structured way during the various phases of evolution within the business. My team really valued getting an outsider’s perspective on an insider’s problems.”

When Strider’s Grow coach first met with their leadership and operational teams, he was struck by their passion for the business and their openness to learn.

“Right from the start, the team had a growth mindset. There was an emotional investment in making the business work and a belief that it would succeed. They were empathetic, and as a fully remote team, they were already incredibly agile – most importantly, they understood that there was room for improvement and that this was an opportunity for them.”

Their identified opportunities for growth included improving their decision-making and communication skills, as well as developing strategic focus, accountability, self-awareness and leadership confidence. The goal was ultimately to transform a team that was operationally focused and reactive into a winning team of proactive leaders. A team that would be able to scale faster than the business itself to navigate the complexities that come along with that growth.

What followed was an ongoing series of one-on- one sessions, workshops, coaching exercises, strategic meetings, regular strategy reviews and annual planning sessions. Their coach was not simply coaching them to be managers, he was coaching them to become CEOs within their roles too.

“It’s a strategy that drives home the idea of ownership and accountability, and the team really embraced that entire development journey.”

Annabel says her team found a sense of security in the coaching process. “They appreciate that there’s a safe space for them to bring their struggles, unpack them in a structured way, and walk away with actionable frameworks that are tried and tested not only locally, but through global best practice. It’s really helpful for them to know they’re not alone in forging through new territories.”

Together with their Grow coach, Annabel and the management team fine-tuned Strider’s core purpose and values, contextualising the stories they shared and evaluating the impact of their purpose on the business.

They tested their ideologies: how they showed up as a company, how they treated their employees and how they were viewed by the world outside. For Strider, this is an ongoing process that engenders a deeper emotional understanding of a company culture that is shifting in its expansion of people, personalities, ideas and voices.

Throughout the team’s transformation, their Grow coach supported every individual with their coaching sessions, all the while monitoring, evaluating, and assisting each person in effective delegation principles and managerial leverage. He was always at hand to help them apply their newfound knowledge in a practical and result-driven way. It was a journey that quickly gained momentum.

However, one core issue in a fast-paced industry is that people often put their heads down and just ‘get the work done’. In using this approach, their coach pointed out, people tend to miss key information: the Strider team needed to raise their heads and gain a holistic understanding of what was going on all around them, not just what was happening in front of them. More than that, they needed to understand who they were as people and as leaders.

True leadership confidence comes from self- awareness, and so their Grow coach started by soliciting feedback in a safe space. He also introduced them to the DISC personality and behavioural assessment. A well-known tool in business coaching, DISC helps create a deeper understanding of self as well as others and can be incredibly valuable in unlocking leadership potential.

Their coach also worked closely with the team to improve their persuasion and influence skills, helping them prepare for meetings and important conversations, showing them how to adjust language, position arguments, propose new ideas and execute actions against their strategies.

Annabel says, “They’re learning more about their roles in the team as well as who they are as individuals. Their personal development is a testament to the impact of the growth strategy. They’re using the new skills and knowledge they’ve acquired to actively approach challenges.”

“How we show up and how we do things has always been important, and our team has always lived our culture, although now we have much sharper definitions of who we are. Today everyone in the team has the skill to clearly articulate what it is that makes us different,” says Annabel.

“The team has grown in leaps and bounds,” says their Grow coach. “Whereas before, it was up to Annabel to drive the strategic meetings, now they’re the ones who speak up and set the strategic goals.

They’re proactive and confident and they take full ownership of their roles. They’re starting to think differently, to ask different questions, and to make well-informed decisions that gear the business for growth.”

The ongoing coaching is both creating leadership confidence and maintaining focus around the strategic choices made by the business. The leadership team is now empowered to set the correct goals for the quarter relative to their BHAG and targets and is supported in the execution of these goals. This has created a more focused sales leader and has allowed the team to exercise and build their strategic muscle demonstrated by the growth of the business. Strider has been able to almost double its revenue.

Even the size of the team itself has doubled. A new strategic council has been established, and for the last three consecutive quarters, everyone on the team is improving their execution scores quarter- on-quarter.

There’s also an elevated culture of proactively researching trends and patterns, of trust and teamwork, of inviting neutral peers to challenge their thinking and adding more structured logic to their written and verbal communications. They’re providing context to their ideas, highlighting risks and benefits, considering opposing views and executing strategies within a framework that delivers key results.

Ultimately, their Grow coach says, “The team confidently puts forth their ideas and arguments in a more structured manner, they know where they’ll play and how they’ll win.”

As for the journey forward, Annabel agrees that there is no final destination. “Coaching is just as important as ongoing education. It’s a critical component to both our past and present journey here at Strider, and a critical component of people development in business in general.”