How Smartlink got its leaders to run the whole business, not just their part.

Great in their lane, siloed from the whole

Smartlink Group builds and manages telecom infrastructure, the towers and sites its carrier customers depend on. Its directors and VPs are strong operators: project-management directors, real estate specialists, construction site managers, people who get things done and hit the deadline. What most of them rarely got was time to step back and see how their piece fit the whole.

Everyone's siloed in their little lanes, focused on exactly what they do. It's hard to see beyond that, to see how your piece fits into a bigger puzzle, and that the other pieces matter just as much.Kristen Sperry, Director of Process & Training, Smartlink

Historically, the majority have been task-driven, crossing things off the list and hitting deadlines, without much room to step back and see how all the pieces fit together for a company.

A summit built on one word: Together

For the second year, Smartlink brought its directors and VPs from across the country into its Annapolis headquarters. This year's theme was Together: get everyone physically in one room, and on the same page about where the company is going and how it gets there. Capsim fit the theme exactly, because everything ran in teams.

The instinct to use it came from inside. A Smartlink leader had run the simulation at a previous company years earlier and remembered the big-picture view it gave him, so when the team wanted something with real, tangible takeaways, this is what he reached for.

Put in charge of a whole company

At the summit, Smartlink ran its leaders through the Leadership Accelerator, a team-based business simulation. In six or seven teams, they took control of a virtual company and made the real calls a leadership team makes, across product, marketing, sales, and finance, over four rounds, with a debrief after each. Smartlink's culture is fiercely competitive, and the debriefs made it impossible to look away.

The debrief rounds were the best part. You're seeing that this team made that choice, and now they're in first place, or they dropped to last.Kristen Sperry, Director of Process & Training, Smartlink

Watching six or seven teams take completely different paths, some launching new products, some taking loans, some not, made a quiet point: there's rarely one right answer, and your own team's instinct is only one of many.

Set outside their own industry, on purpose

The simulation deliberately wasn't set in telecom. Smartlink wondered going in whether that distance would make it harder to connect, and found the opposite.

It was actually more relatable than we thought. We don't build a different kind of chip, but we do come to the table with a different offering, and that takes developing it, training people, putting the right team in place, marketing it. There was a lot more overlap than I expected.Kristen Sperry, Director of Process & Training, Smartlink

The distance helped in another way, too. Outside their own model, no one felt their real decisions were being judged, so people experimented and got creative instead of defending how they already work.

Four functions that used to run in silos

• Product
• Marketing
• Sales
• Finance

↓

One company, run as one team

They started leading the whole business

The takeaways were concrete. The delivery teams saw that growth means building new offerings as well as executing the current ones, and that even a great offering goes nowhere without investing in sales. The sales team saw its own work valued, and everyone saw that selling is a shared job.

Smartlink is honest that it's early, a couple of months on, the clearest change so far is in how people see the business, and in the gaps they now notice on their own teams. But that shift, from heads-down in a lane to eyes-up on the whole company, is exactly what the summit set out to do.