MITER BRANDS

Challenges / Opportunities

MITER Brands had assembled an exceptionally talented group of operations leaders responsible for driving performance across multiple facilities and functions. While individual leaders and business units were producing strong results, the leadership team recognized an opportunity to evolve from a collection of highly capable functional leaders into a unified executive team aligned around shared priorities, common goals, and enterprise-wide success.

Key challenges and opportunities included:

• Strengthening trust and collaboration across functions and locations.
• Breaking down organizational silos that limited communication, coordination, and shared ownership.
• Improving alignment between Operations, Commercial, and Support functions.
• Creating greater clarity around organizational goals, priorities, roles, and accountability.
• Building a culture where leaders felt comfortable challenging ideas, raising concerns, and providing candid feedback.
• Shifting from reactive problem-solving to more strategic and disciplined thinking.
• Developing more effective meeting practices, decision-making processes, and follow-through.
• Creating a stronger One Miter mindset while maintaining the strengths of local operations.

Recommendations & Implementations

Mission Facilitators International designed and facilitated a two-day Operations Leadership Team Retreat followed by a structured follow-up session focused on sustaining momentum and embedding new leadership behaviors.

The engagement incorporated several key components:

Executive Team Development

• Introduced the distinction between a working group and a true leadership team.
• Utilized principles from The Wisdom of Teams and Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team to establish a common language and framework for team effectiveness.
• Facilitated conversations around trust, vulnerability, accountability, commitment, and shared results.
• Helped leaders identify behaviors that strengthen or weaken executive team performance.

Trust and Leadership Effectiveness

• Conducted in-depth discussions on the role trust plays in organizational performance.
• Introduced practical frameworks focused on sincerity, reliability, competence, and care.
• Helped leaders identify specific behaviors that increase trust and improve collaboration.
• Reinforced the connection between trust, communication, accountability, and business performance.

Strategic Problem Solving

• Facilitated structured discussions around the organization’s most important strategic and operational challenges.
• Guided the team through a disciplined process of defining problems before generating solutions.
• Helped leaders identify root causes rather than focusing exclusively on symptoms.
• Created alignment around two critical leadership questions:
  • How do we better align Operations, Commercial, and Support around business strategy and execution?
  • How do we discipline ourselves to clearly define problems before generating solutions?

Culture and Team Effectiveness

• Facilitated conversations regarding culture, communication, safety, recognition, accountability, and leadership behavior.
• Examined the hidden costs of organizational silos and fragmented decision-making.
• Reinforced the importance of psychological safety, candid dialogue, and shared ownership.
• Created opportunities for leaders to celebrate successes while identifying opportunities for growth.

Feedback and Leadership Development

• Introduced practical frameworks for delivering effective feedback.
• Equipped leaders with tools to have more direct, constructive, and developmental conversations.
• Reinforced the mindset that feedback is a gift intended to help others grow and perform at higher levels.

Results

The retreat and follow-up work generated several meaningful outcomes:

• Greater alignment around enterprise-wide goals and priorities.
• Stronger relationships and trust among executive leaders.
• Increased awareness of how siloed thinking impacts organizational performance.
• Clear identification of the leadership behaviors required to build a One Miter culture.
• Improved understanding of the connection between trust, communication, accountability, and results.
• Greater commitment to defining problems before rushing to solutions.
  Increased focus on strategic thinking, long-term planning, and leadership development.
• Creation of practical action plans to improve organizational alignment, communication, and execution.

The team also developed several leadership principles that continue to influence how they work together:

• Shared ownership over functional ownership.
• Enterprise thinking over local optimization.
• Problem definition before solution generation.
• Trust-based collaboration over positional authority.
• Clear accountability paired with mutual support.

Follow Up

Mission Facilitators International conducted a structured follow-up session approximately one month after the retreat to reinforce learning, assess progress, and identify next steps. During the session, leaders reflected on key insights, reviewed progress against commitments, explored team assessment findings, and discussed practical ways to strengthen feedback, accountability, and executive team effectiveness.

The leadership team also established ongoing commitments related to:

• Improving alignment between business functions.
• Clarifying organizational goals and decision-making processes.
• Enhancing meeting effectiveness and accountability.
• Strengthening feedback and coaching practices.
• Building a more unified One Miter culture.