The Atlanta Hawks are an NBA basketball organization that had been underperforming for an extended period of time. Despite having access to high-level talent and resources, the organization was struggling to produce results both on and off the court.
The Atlanta Hawks sought to strengthen leadership within their organization to address challenges related to team dynamics, employee engagement, and decision-making. They needed a structured approach to empower leaders with the skills to drive collaboration and build a more cohesive culture.
The organization was experiencing significant siloing and fragmentation across departments, with a breakdown in communication at every level. There was a real lack of ownership and camaraderie among the team, and people did not feel connected to a shared mission or purpose. Leadership had become overly reliant on personalities and systems rather than on people working well together, and the culture reflected that.
Like many organizations in their industry, they had cycled through a revolving door of high-level leaders hoping someone would crack the code and turn things around. They also brought in various outside consultants to address the dysfunction. Neither approach produced lasting change because neither addressed the root cause.
The turning point came when leadership had a fundamental realization: people are the engine of the organization. Up until that point, the focus had been on finding the right personality or the right system. Once they recognized the importance of people actually working well together, they bought into the idea that a leadership operating system could be the fix they had been looking for.
MPWR worked with the Atlanta Hawks over the course of two and a half years. The first phase focused on getting the leadership operating system installed at the senior level, addressing the communication breakdowns, siloing, and lack of shared ownership that had defined the culture. As alignment was restored at the top, it created the clarity needed to make some long-overdue personnel decisions that leadership had previously been afraid to act on. Bringing in new people who were aligned with the culture they were building accelerated the transformation significantly.
The second phase was about the organization learning to run the system themselves, building confidence and deepening their practice until the breakthroughs they had been working toward started to show up in a tangible way.
Communication across all levels of the organization improved dramatically in both health and effectiveness.
Team members went from feeling siloed and fragmented to feeling a genuine sense of ownership, collaboration, and shared purpose.
Leadership gained the clarity and confidence to make the necessary personnel changes they had previously avoided.
The organization became a winning, high-performing program.
“MPWR Coaching brought a fresh perspective and practical tools that truly transformed how our leaders operate. The impact on our culture and collaboration has been remarkable.”
– Atlanta Hawks Leadership Team
The dysfunction you are carrying is not a people problem, it is a culture problem. Once you understand culture at its root and address it with the right system, everything changes. That is exactly what MPWR is here to do, and we have never seen it fail when a leader is willing to go first.
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