Stubbe's
Building Alignment, Leadership, and Scalable Growth
The Challenge
Before partnering with Strive, Stubbe’s management team was relatively inexperienced, and the organization lacked a clear strategy. Leadership attention was largely focused on productivity, efficiency, and maximizing production capacity, which often led to a stronger emphasis on practical results than on people.
Although Stubbe’s valued a healthy culture, development of leaders and teams was not always intentional. This resulted in underdeveloped leadership capability, periods of employee turnover, and a culture that didn’t always fully reflect Stubbe’s core values. At the time, the organization had not fully recognized how critical leadership development and people alignment were to long-term performance.
The Shift
Working with Strive marked a meaningful turning point.
Stubbe’s became far more deliberate and disciplined in how it operates. Strategy is now clearly documented, regularly reviewed, and consistently communicated as the business evolves. Communication across the organization improved significantly, with greater involvement and reinforcement to drive clarity, alignment, and shared ownership.
Leaders also gained a much deeper understanding of how high-performing teams function. These principles were applied across divisions and leadership teams, strengthening collaboration, reinforcing enterprise-wide thinking, and reducing the risk of silos forming as the organization grew.
The Results
As a result:
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Stubbe’s has developed a more aligned and connected workforce, where employees clearly understand the culture they work within and feel meaningfully connected to it. This alignment has improved team effectiveness and strengthened collaboration across the organization.
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The company has successfully expanded its workforce by 62% over the past three years, while simultaneously improving its employee retention rate to 87%.
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Over the past two years, the business has achieved 43% growth across multiple business units, demonstrating strong execution and the ability to scale without losing clarity or cohesion.
Today, Stubbe’s is growing with greater leadership capacity, clearer direction, and a culture that supports both people and performance as the organization continues to expand.
Umicore Burlington
Driving Results with Thriving Teams
The Challenge
Before working with Strive, Umicore’s leadership team and execution efforts were fragmented. Each leader held an intuitive - and often private - definition of success within their own department.
Leadership meetings tended to be polite and guarded. Mediocre results were often tolerated, as long as issues were not perceived as “my department’s fault.” While intentions were good, multiple competing priorities and game plans limited clarity, weakened culture, and reduced mutual support.
Without a shared strategic direction, optimized results felt out of reach, leading to underperformance and reduced organizational health.
The Shift
Partnering with Strive ushered in a new level of clarity and cohesion. The senior leadership team committed to becoming the number one team, eliminating silos and shifting from individual optimization to collective ownership. Together with Human Resources, leaders embraced humility and servant leadership, making their own transformation the priority.
Through initial offsite sessions and ongoing quarterly work, the team built a strong foundation of trust, healthy conflict, and clarity. Leaders learned to challenge one another productively, align around shared strategic anchors, and communicate more consistently across the organization.
Meeting structure and cadence were redesigned, replacing unfocused discussions with disciplined rhythms, clear priorities, and meaningful metrics — enabling focus on what mattered most.
The Results
As a result, Umicore now operates with an aligned leadership team focused on enterprise-wide success.
Leaders take greater ownership, communicate with clarity, and balance strong relationships with disciplined execution. Strategy is clearly defined and cascaded across the organization, ensuring alignment across teams and business units.
Today, Umicore has a leadership culture that drives performance and thrives together - supporting both strong business results and a healthier organization.
Commonwell Mutual Insurance Company
Background
This insurance company was formed through mergers and acquisitions. It had been several separate companies that eventually decided to band together into one holistic provider. The boards and senior leadership teams worked together to create one board and to fashion a new leadership structure. No layoffs occurred during the transition, although two individuals decided to retire. Others accepted new positions with different titles. The CEO, Tim Shauf, made it his personal goal to grow the company, to expand into new territory, and to be hiring new people to join the organization within a year. He met this goal before his deadline. The company was doing well outwardly, but inwardly was struggling with consistency, clarity, and trust.
Approach
A STRIVE! consultant was brought into create board clarity and senior leadership team clarity. The communication needed to come from the very top. It was clear early on that the board needed to unify on the strategic direction of the new organization. Once this was in place, the consultant turned to focus on the senior leadership teams.
The CEO was passionately committed to people within his organization. So much so, that a management team and an executive team was created; however, it was unclear which group was the decision-making body for which topics, or when it would act in an advisory capacity. This lack of clarity was a central focus of two offsites, until a new structure was developed. Throughout all of this, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality assessment helped to create better understanding of decision-making and factors to consider, with the Five Behaviours of a Team as a foundation on which to build trust, transparency, and accountability.
Outcome
The team immediately experienced improvements in their interactions and decided to implement the MBTI assessment throughout the organization. They also decided to use comparison reporting to gauge their progress on how their team dynamics were improving, or failing to reach desired levels. (They are really tough on themselves!) The company has gone on to expand their territory even further, and to define their own standards for organization health. Decision-making has been faster. The clarity of the six questions has fostered better accountability and results. As we write this, they are currently expanding and hiring to fill new positions.
Evonik Oil Additives Canada
Background
Evonik Oil Additives Canada is a subsidiary of Evonik Industries. Back in 2013, the executive team realized that they were struggling to work together effectively which was coming through loud and clear to head office of Evonik Industries. Since Evonik Industries had already engaged with a Table Group consultant based in the US with surprising results, they decided to call upon STRIVE!, the Canadian consulting partner to The Table Group, to take this team through the same process and become more cohesive and strategic.
Approach
A Table Group consulting partner initiated this work by conducting a 2-Day Leadership team offsite. The pre-work for this session included the Table Group’s Online Team Assessment as well as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality assessment.
The team immediately experienced improvements in their interactions and decided to bring the consultant back for follow-up sessions over the course of the following year. According to Dr. Andrew Swann, team leader, one of the biggest catalysts for change was the willingness of the team members to put into practice what they had learned. It’s one thing to talk about organizational health. It’s entirely different to do the hard work of putting it into practice.
Outcome
The results of this team’s efforts have been impressive and far-reaching. No longer are team members holding in anger and frustration, but rather the open dialogue, increased communication, and collective buy-in has resulted in more collaboration and an aura of enjoyment within the workplace.
