As part of an extended set leadership development programs, we helped the leadership team of BUPA to diagnose their aspirations to become a trans-national organization from a local, British one. In these workshops we infused the participants with some self-reflection of their own value-set and the competence to deal with these cultural differences in the context of business challenges. Moreover, we utilised the Intercultural Competence Profiler to assess the individual and group competence to take advantage of cultural contradictions in the globalization process.

Through our Dilemma Scan we picked out the top dilemmas which increased the resistance to change:

1. Nationally based services vs Globally expanded,
2. Profit vs Non Profit;
3. Quality of Business Systems v. Degree of staff’s caring

BUPA’s leadership team focused on reconciling the top dilemmas. The readiness index of BUPA to further professionalize by truly becoming trans-national showed that the strong points were in the areas of strategic vision and performance management, while areas to develop were mostly knowledge management and getting a more external focus. Task forces were organized to implement the change.

We coached some of the taskforces on how to increase intercultural competence, developing best local practices and how to standardize some of them. We also supported in redefining the performance management system.