A two-day immersive offsite, underpinned by rigorous pre-work diagnostics, behavioral profiling, and structured facilitation – designed to shift a high-caliber Finance leadership team at a global spirits company from functional competence to empowered, commercially integrated performance.
the client
Our client is one of the world’s leading independent spirits businesses – a globally recognized portfolio company with deep craft heritage, distribution across more than 180 countries, and a bold growth agenda. With a new CFO recently in post and a Finance function that had absorbed significant leadership change and organizational restructuring, the business was at an important inflection point.
Perpetual was brought in to work with the North American Finance leadership team – a group of six senior leaders spanning financial planning and analysis, accounting and compliance, commercial finance, and HR business partnering. The brief was clear: strengthen the team, sharpen its identity as a strategic function, and accelerate its ability to operate as genuine business partners rather than financial administrators.
the situation
The Finance team was capable – technically strong, professionally committed, and genuinely motivated by the prospect of doing more meaningful work. But the conditions around them had made it hard to perform at that level. The team had navigated a period of significant turbulence: leadership departures that had previously suppressed candor and psychological safety, structural changes that had blurred roles and accountability, and a new senior leader joining mid-year with a markedly different working style to the rest of the group.
The result was a team operating below its potential – not through lack of effort, but through lack of clarity. Priorities were unclear. Decision rights were ambiguous. The instinct to seek permission before acting had become a cultural habit rather than a conscious choice. And Finance, despite the expertise sitting within it, was being used as a reporting function rather than a strategic one.
The window for change was real. The disruptive leadership influences had departed. A new CFO was actively invested in building something better. And the team itself, when asked directly, rated its own potential highly. The question was whether that potential could be unlocked quickly enough to matter.
the diagnostic picture
Perpetual’s pre-work program ran across four weeks prior to the offsite and brought together three distinct data sources: Predictive Index (PI) behavioral assessments for each team member, Perpetual’s proprietary t3® team health diagnostic, and a series of individual stakeholder interviews conducted by Perpetual’s lead practitioners.
The t3® diagnostic measures six attributes of high-performing team health. The results told a nuanced story – one that was more instructive than a simple headline score would suggest.
The upper-band results – Belonging and Togetherness – were genuine strengths. This was a team with real personal bonds, mutual respect, and a broadly positive working environment. Those foundations mattered and were worth protecting.
The critical finding sat in the lower attributes. Clarity & Alignment was the standout concern: the team lacked a shared understanding of strategy, clear individual roles within it, and confidence in the direction they were being asked to execute against. This was not a marginal gap – it was the primary drag on everything else. A team cannot move with pace, hold each other accountable, or act with genuine autonomy when the destination and the lane markings are unclear.
The Empowerment deficit reinforced this: team members reported limited confidence in their ability to make calls, a sense that organizational obstacles were getting in the way of good work, and a reliance on senior direction for decisions that should have been made at their level.
The PI behavioral mapping added a further layer of insight. Most of the team clustered in profiles oriented toward precision, process discipline, and collaborative stability. One newer member – recently arrived from a different part of the business – mapped to a markedly different profile: faster-paced, more assertive, and more comfortable with ambiguity. This kind of behavioral divergence, left unacknowledged, tends to generate low-level friction and misattributed tension. Named and worked with deliberately, it becomes exactly the cognitive diversity a team like this needs.
the intervention
The offsite ran over two days and was designed around Tuckman’s stages of team development – using the diagnostic evidence to locate the team accurately at the late Storming / cusp of Norming stage and using the offsite itself as the deliberate Norming intervention. The goal was not to paper over the cracks. It was to move through them.
Day one focused on trust and shared context. It opened with a personal storytelling exercise – mapping defining moments across each person’s professional and personal journey – which built vulnerability-based trust faster and more authentically than any icebreaker could. A high-pressure execution simulation surfaced the team’s natural behavioral patterns under pressure: who leads, who withdraws, how decisions get made when the stakes feel real. The t3® playback followed, giving the team an objective mirror to look into. The afternoon brought the interview themes back into the room – not as an indictment, but as a structured, facilitated conversation about the reality everyone already knew.
Day two moved from insight to commitment. The PI behavioral playback gave the team a shared language for how they are each wired – and for what the group’s collective profile means for how they work together. A Strategy on a Page exercise translated organizational commitments into Finance-owned priorities. A complex team simulation tested structured problem-solving and decision-making under ambiguity. The session closed with the co-creation of a Team Charter – behavioral standards, meeting norms, decision-making principles, and individual commitments – followed by a structured fast feedback exercise designed to normalize candor as a team habit rather than an occasional event.
the perpetual methodology
The engagement integrated three proprietary Perpetual frameworks with established academic models – creating a program that was structured and evidence-led without feeling theoretical or generic.
the output
The offsite produced a set of immediate team artefacts – a co-created Strategy on a Page, a Team Charter, and a prioritized MOSCOW workload view – alongside a post-program output deck synthesizing the full diagnostic picture and five prioritized workstreams for the Finance leadership to own and drive forward.
what this engagement demonstrates
Finance leadership teams face a specific and underappreciated challenge. The behavioral profiles that make Finance professionals excellent at their technical craft – precision, compliance orientation, methodical process, preference for certainty – can actively work against the empowerment shifts the function is being asked to make. Moving from scorekeeper to strategic partner is not just a change in role description. It requires a different relationship with ambiguity, a different approach to decision-making, and a different level of collective confidence. Perpetual’s t3® methodology is designed to address exactly that tension.
The engagement also illustrates a broader principle: timing matters. The conditions that allow a team to shift are not always present. When they are – a leadership reset, a new senior figure invested in change, a team that believes in its own potential – the window needs to be used deliberately and quickly. The pre-work in this engagement meant that the moment the team arrived in the room, we were already working at depth. Not forming. Not warming up. Norming.
The team arrived at the offsite with a strong foundation – genuine bonds, real capability, and high self-belief in what they could become. What they needed was the structure, the language, and the shared commitments to act on it. That is the work Perpetual is built for.
