SMA is a leading global specialist in photovoltaic system technology. Their original request to Fraendi was to work with the company’s five most senior managers to improve their ability to collaborate. Rainer had previously met with one of the company’s organisational development staff at a conference who was excited about Fraendi’s new methods and approaches and later participated in the first Fraendi event. A year later, she recommended Rainer to the company’s CFO to consult with the general management circle. After meeting the CEO and CFO, they accepted Fraendi’s proposal to hold a retreat.

A 3-year partnership followed, supporting the five most senior managers in a series of retreats, and coaching three senior managers in building on their leadership profiles. 

Fraendi’s main purpose was to support the business in improving its capacity for transformational and relational thinking while allowing senior managers to work together in a more collegiate way. The business needed to adapt to thrive in a fast-moving, mature renewable energy market that requires a company to be industrially efficient and innovative in developing new systems and ideas. As the market in renewables matured, SMA recognised that it needed to fundamentally change the company culture to a more collegial style to allow it to hold and function in the required modalities and increase product diversity. The company needed senior managers concerned with strategy and strategic issues, not just day-to-day engineering and management decisions.

Fraendi convened a series of three retreats with the general management circle between February 2020 and the end of 2021, when the company decided to restructure in a more entrepreneurial way. During the retreats, Fraendi drew on the Living Strategy Framework to sort and prioritise the issues for exploration and used the Art of Hosting to lead the clients into deep and meaningful work and exchanges with each other. 

During the retreats, Fraendi used the Living Strategy Framework to identify where the leadership team thought their main problem was and then took a step back to find the logical question that preceded it. One whole retreat was held on stakeholder sensing, and it revealed some missing pieces. Fraendi held this delicate space for shifts to coalesce and cohere, subtly accompanying teams and walking alongside them. This held space allowed people to participate naturally, uncover their own possibilities, create a new relational field, and take shared ownership of the strategy. The conditions were created for leadership capacities to grow, for people to bring their whole selves and to ask the questions that needed addressing.

The retreats have made a big difference within the client system. After the first retreat, the participants became increasingly comfortable working on a strategy project. Fraendi accompanied some of the more strategic decision-making in the leadership team and saw how they were adapting to the explosion in demand for renewable energy solutions. However, Fraendi was not so regularly involved to be able to claim any of the outcomes from our interventions directly.

The leadership team has become more effective and faster in decision-making and can take decisions they might not have been able to previously. The CEO decided to restructure the company toward a more entrepreneurial structure. Rainer ran a mini-retreat with the senior manager and his right-hand support to examine everything that could go “wrong” to find the relevant attention points so they could lead their part of the change.

This case study shows the importance of Fraendi’s companionship and artful hosting of a space for participants to coalesce and cohere in designing systemic approaches that completely review and transform business models in a fast-moving sector.

The mental demands on leaders in such environments are high, and like many other companies, SMA has managers who struggle with such conditions. However, with Fraendi walking alongside, changing how people perceive their situation can allow different actions to become available and for people to recognise they can deal with the issues at hand just as the people they are.