Case Study: Automotive Aftermarket Group, Leading with awareness thru AQ®, shaping the future

Leading with awareness thru AQ®, shaping the future

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY   Facing an aggressive five-year growth target, an established automotive business used the AQ® assessment to ground a two-day strategy-alignment session for its senior leaders — who left with a shared, jointly owned plan and, for the first time, a conversation about building the future rather than reviewing the past.

About the Client

The organization is an established automotive aftermarket and components business operating in India, and a unit within a larger industrial group. Decades of steady, incremental growth had built a stable, well-run operation — and a leadership culture more practiced at reviewing past performance than designing the future. With an ambitious new growth target now on the table, that culture was the thing most in need of a shift.

Situation

The organization’s leadership had set an ambitious target: roughly tripling the business within five years, a step-change after a long history of incremental, single-digit growth. The President knew the number could not be hit top-down. Delivering it would depend on whether his senior leadership team — nine functional and business-unit heads — was aligned behind the ambition and equipped, as a team, to pursue it. He was clear-eyed about the gap. The group had the operating discipline of a mature business, but it had rarely come together to think about the future; leadership meetings reviewed the last month and the last quarter, not the next five years. Before committing the team to a strategy, the President wanted an honest read on where they stood — individually and collectively — on the capabilities a growth agenda would demand.

Implication

Left unaddressed, the risk was a familiar one: a bold target announced from the top, nodded at in the room, and quietly unmet. Without genuine alignment, the growth agenda would stay the board’s plan rather than the team’s — and in a competitive market, a mature business that defends its position rather than extends it tends to lose ground. The cost of inaction was not a weak plan. It was no shared ownership of one.

Approach

Assessment Design

AQai® Certified Partner Ramesh Srinivasan of LeadFac Solutions anchored the engagement on the AQ® assessment, completed online by all nine members of the senior leadership team ahead of the session. Results were configured as a team report, so the group could read its collective adaptability profile across the AQ® dimensions rather than a stack of individual scores. To keep the focus on the team, the President’s own results were deliberately held out of the aggregate, so one strong profile would not skew or shadow the group picture.

Engagement Structure

The work was delivered as a facilitated two-day session for the leadership team, run without slide decks. The first half-day went to self-awareness: a debrief of the team’s AQ® profile, framed not as a scoreboard but as a map of where the group was strong and where it would need support. Rather than presenting conclusions, Ramesh ran the debrief as a facilitated discussion — small-group breakouts, then a whole-team synthesis — so the leaders themselves named the areas they needed to develop. The remaining day and a half moved into strategy alignment, building directly on that shared self-awareness. After the session, every leader received a one-to-one debrief of their individual results.

Tailoring & Integration

To turn awareness into a plan the team could act on, the AQ® data was integrated with established strategy tools: Force Field Analysis to surface what would help and hinder the growth agenda, the Ansoff matrix to test where real growth would have to come from, Porter’s Five Forces to widen the team’s view of competition, and de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats to pressure-test decisions from several angles. The engagement also produced confidential, forward-looking input to support the organization’s leadership-continuity planning.

Results

The team designed the future instead of reviewing the past

Every leader observed that their meetings had always centered on what had already happened — last month’s numbers, last quarter’s results. This was the first occasion the group had sat together to build what came next. By the end of the two days, they had an actionable plan the team owned, rather than a target handed down from the board.

The plan carried joint ownership

Because the leaders surfaced the priorities themselves — through the AQ® debrief and the strategy work — each left accountable for a part of the agenda, rather than waiting for direction from the top.

The team reframed where growth would come from

Working through the Ansoff matrix, the leaders concluded that business-as-usual activity would not deliver a step-change target, and committed to pursuing new products and new markets as the route to it.

AQ® gave the team a shared development agenda

The group identified the specific adaptability areas — spanning all three AQ® dimensions of Ability, Character, and Environment — it would need to strengthen to deliver the plan, turning a set of scores into a concrete focus for the months ahead.

What the Client Said

Practitioner Spotlight

LED BY

LeadFac Solutions

Ramesh Srinivasan  ·  Lead Facilitator & Executive Coach

LeadFac Solutions is an India-based leadership consultancy that partners with organizations on leadership development, executive coaching, organizational development, competency management, and group process facilitation. The practice specializes in helping senior teams build self-awareness and work through complex change together, combining validated assessments with facilitative methods that draw decisions out of the room rather than imposing them from the front.

This engagement was co-facilitated by Namita Naik.

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