The challenge: Growing mindsets to support collaboration and shared ownership

Following the merger, 2degrees began a transformation journey to bring the two organisations together. Its executive team championed a bold, accountable and customer-centric culture, and developed an ambitious three-year business strategy. Three leadership behaviours were identified as critical to driving future success: Build Trust, Empower Teams, and Drive Results.

An internal learning needs analysis revealed that inconsistent leadership capability among mid-level leaders was a primary barrier to high performance. Many leaders were also operating in functional silos with a mindset of individual accountability rather than a ‘one team’ philosophy.

The Organizational Development team identified several strategies to close these gaps, including a leadership development experience that would:

• Build greater accountability, connection and collaboration across the organisation, and
• Nurture shared ownership in leaders through the mindset ‘Collectively we will deliver the strategy’.

Following a competitive RFP process, 2degrees engaged Adeption to co-design and deliver this leadership development experience.

Six-month experience designed to scale

The Leadership Collective is a six-month, scalable development experience for leaders at 2degrees that brings development into daily work. It serves as a vehicle to help leaders work in a more collaborative way and take collective responsibility for organizational performance.

Grounded in 2degree’s leadership behaviours and the concept of Accountable Leadership (a key development focus at 2degrees), the design integrates mindset development principles, adaptive leadership, and Adeption’s Be Conscious, Be Curious, Be Better (B3) methodology to help leaders bridge the knowing-doing gap.

The learning journey is structured across five progressive modules:

• Leadership at 2degrees: Establishing baseline mindsets.
• Leading Self: Focusing on self-awareness and individual growth.
• Leading Teams: Developing the ability to empower and grow others.
• Leading Across 2degrees: Fostering cross-functional collaboration.
• Sustaining Growth: Embedding a habit of continuous development.

Blended design: The experience seamlessly combines in-person workshops with digital workouts on Adeption's AI-powered platform, small-group accountability peer pods, and strategic mini-projects targeting systemic challenges. Importantly, it honours 2degrees’ commitment to Te Ao Māori principles, with each cohort’s experience opening and closing with karakia (blessing) and mihi whakatau (traditional Māori welcome).

Delivering impact across all key indicators

2degrees set four key indicators for The Leadership Collective during the design phase. Data from the first seven cohorts demonstrates exceptional impact across all four indicators.

Individual leadership capability shift

• 73% of participants reported an increase in leadership confidence.
• 65% of the 56 participants who were assessed at the start and end of the program added a leadership mindset to their range.

Collective leadership capability shift

• Accountable Leadership scores given by the Executive and Senior Leadership Teams at 2degrees increased 12.4% across 1O key attributes for all leaders.

Shift in perceptions of leadership

• Employee perceptions of leadership at 2degrees have shown positive shifts since the start of the experience. Build Trust employee ratings have increased 7%, Empower Teams increased 15%, and Drive Results increased 5.3%.

Business outcomes

• 9O% of participants practiced at least two of 2degrees’ leadership behaviors through the actions they set during the experience.
• The experience had a direct impact on talent retention.

Key success factors

The action-learning approach: The Leadership Collective design empowers leaders to pull content relevant to their context and challenges and apply it directly through experiments in the flow of work – ensuring they make real progress while developing.

Collaboration: Participants actively build cross-functional relationships and learn from one another through their groups, peer pods, and strategic mini-projects – directly supporting the goals of collaboration and taking shared responsibility for delivering the strategy.

Senior and executive leadership involvement: The Leadership Collective team engaged executives and senior leaders throughout design and delivery of the experience, ensuring strong buy-in and permission for participants to prioritize development.