As a leader, you have a unique opportunity: while your core responsibilities center on your team’s performance, your greatest impact can come from your ability to spark and sustain collaboration across organizational boundaries.
Despite your best efforts to work across teams and functions, you may find yourself struggling to achieve broader organizational impact.
What if you and your team could use a proven approach to expand your influence, enhance your strategic role, and strengthen your long-term impact across the organization—while simultaneously building more powerful partnerships with external stakeholders?
The Big Picture offers a transformative perspective—one that equips you to drive business success, not just functional excellence.
The most significant change has been the complete transformation in our team’s mindset. We’ve moved from feeling like victims and believing ‘we cannot change things’ to consistently asking ‘what opportunities do we have?’ This shift has empowered us to address longstanding challenges that we previously considered insurmountable. — Team Leader, Pharmaceutical Organization
What You and Your Team Will Gain
Broaden Your Perspective
Your impact can reach beyond your day-to-day function—you have the opportunity to contribute to organization-wide success.
- You’ll learn how to establish priorities that maximize the business impact of your role in the broader organizational context.
- Your team will develop the ability to apply multi-stakeholder perspectives to navigate complexity with confidence.
Participating in the program together created a deeper understanding of how my colleagues approach problems and process information. This ‘teamwork muscle’ helps in everything we do, especially during high pressure periods. — Program Participant
Expand Your Influence and Drive Business Success
The most successful teams take initiative to create alignment and drive organizational success, rather than waiting for direction from above.
- You’ll step into a proactive leadership role, orchestrating cross-functional execution of organizational strategy.
- You’ll build traction and gain support across the organization through structured influencing strategies.
- Your team will become a key player in organization-wide strategic execution.
The influencing framework was really helpful for presenting our perspectives with greater clarity and impact. It helped me understand stakeholders’ different needs and create alignment, bringing everyone together in a joint project where each person could feel, ‘Yes, now we are reaching a conclusion that works for all of us.’ — Cross-Functional Leader
Strengthen External Stakeholder Relationships
The same tools that enhance your internal collaboration will also elevate your engagement with external partners including customers, suppliers and regulatory bodies.
- You’ll navigate complex multi-stakeholder environments more confidently, integrating internal priorities with external opportunities with constraints.
- You’ll apply your enhanced influencing and collaboration skills to build more productive external partnerships.
- Your team will become known for building collaborative, high-value stakeholder relationships, becoming a partner of choice amongst external stakeholders.
We found out that some of our feedback never reached the right person in our external partner’s organization. We identified and contacted the responsible person directly, and we met to explain why our involvement was important. We clarified that we weren’t trying to do their job but that we could make the process much more impactful if we were involved. Now we are consistently involved in the initial project launch meetings, which changes the whole downstream effectiveness of each project. — Team Member
Position Yourself as a Strategic Driver
When you embrace organization-wide impact, you don’t just contribute to business success—you shape it. By building strong collaborative partnerships, you become part of the organization’s connective tissue.
- You’ll elevate your impact and reputation by establishing meaningful partnerships across the organization.
- You’ll become a catalyst for organizational success by aligning diverse work styles and perspectives toward common goals.
- You’ll create lasting collaborative relationships through clear agreements that honor both individual and team working preferences.
Previously, I felt powerless in presentations with competing agendas. The stakeholder mapping approach helps me understand each person’s perspective and tailor my communication accordingly. Now I can effectively present my insights while addressing the specific concerns of each function. — Leadership Participant
The Essential Tools for Strategic Impact
Success in driving organizational impact requires a specific set of tools and frameworks. Here are the essential capabilities you’ll learn.
Decision-Making and Collaboration
Getting things done across organizational boundaries and with external stakeholders requires new approaches to decision-making and partnership building. These tools help you move from coordination to true collaboration:
- Team-Based Decision Making: A structured process that incorporates multiple stakeholder perspectives from both inside and outside the organization, leading to faster, higher-quality decisions that drive holistic success. You’ll use this to accelerate initiatives that previously stalled due to lack of alignment between internal functions or external partners.
- Collaboration Criteria: A framework for aligning goals, styles, and preferences between collaborators, leading to stronger partnerships and more effective teamwork. You’ll use this to build clear agreements that honor both individual work styles and team needs.
Stakeholder Engagement
Your ability to achieve broader impact depends on understanding and influencing key stakeholders across your entire business ecosystem. These frameworks help you build and leverage the right relationships:
- Stakeholder Mapping: A relationship-focused framework incorporating parameters like Importance, Mindset, Personal Relationship, Value Perception, and Credibility to build trust and align objectives effectively.
- Influencing Without Authority: A comprehensive framework that equips you with methods to build alignment and drive initiatives without positional power, especially valuable in complex organizational structures and with external stakeholders.
Enterprise Impact and Visibility
To maximize your contribution across your entire sphere of influence, you need to clearly demonstrate your value and focus on what matters most. These tools help you prioritize and communicate your impact:
- The Value Map: Helps you clearly articulate your contributions to broader goals in concrete terms, ensuring recognition across the organization and improving alignment with corporate goals.
- Organization-Savvy Prioritization: Enables you to prioritize work with an organization-wide view, preventing siloed efforts and aligning work with broader organizational goals.
How We Make This Transformation Happen
Our behavioral training approach moves beyond traditional conceptual learning to deliver highly engaging, job-relevant, and immediately applicable skills development. Designed for deep retention and real-world application, our method has been refined over three decades to ensure you not only learn but actively use new skills in your work.
Our methodology combines four key elements:
- Experiential & Actionable – You’ll practice new skills on real, current challenges, ensuring relevance and immediate utility.
- Minimal Theory, Maximum Impact – No over-intellectualizing—just simple, behavioral steps that trigger ‘light bulb’ moments.
- Seamless Workplace Integration – You’ll leave with clear action plans on when and where to apply the skills, ensuring learning translates directly into performance improvement.
- Sustained Behavior Change & Long-Term Retention – Following learning sessions, you’ll continue to build and reinforce skills over time, through a structured process of action commitments, peer accountability, and ongoing reflection. This process is supported by an app for habit-based reinforcement, digital coaching, and check-ins to ensure lasting impact.
What made your program stand out was the practical implementation structure, where I consistently applied concepts to real projects and used reminders to track my progress. This practical approach made all the difference. It ensured that what we learned actually translated into genuine behavior change rather than becoming just another binder collecting dust on the shelf. — Program Participant
How This Approach is Different
Most development programs focus on individual skills or role-specific capabilities. The Big Picture takes you further:
- Beyond Individual Focus—Into Organizational Impact: You don’t just align with organizational goals; you actively lead organization-wide collaboration.
- Beyond Your Role—Into Influence: You develop the strategic presence and influence to make an impact across the business.
- Beyond Internal Focus—Into Ecosystem Leadership: You develop skills to not just manage but lead relationships with customers, partners, and other external stakeholders.
- Beyond Training—Into Transformation: Our comprehensive program combines skill development with ongoing reinforcement and support, ensuring immediate application and sustained behavioral change.
Proven Results
Organizations implementing The Big Picture program have achieved:
- Strengthened leadership capabilities
- Elevated the perception of their organization from being seen as an internal service provider to being seen as a strategic partner
- Breakthroughs on complex cross-functional projects
- Improved stakeholder engagement and collaboration
Our team successfully coordinated education topics across multiple product teams—something that had previously involved fragmented messages and customer frustration. By bringing diverse perspectives together through structured partnership discussions, we’ve created consistent, sequential engagement that builds understanding over time. — Team Leader
What Senior Leaders Are Saying
Mark Fourman designed and delivered a program that addressed our challenges head-on. The workshop equipped our team with practical frameworks for stakeholder mapping, influencing without authority, and organization-savvy prioritization. What set this experience apart was the focus on immediately applicable skills rather than abstract theory. I highly recommend Mark to any leader looking to expand their team’s influence and strategic impact across organizational boundaries. — SVP and Head of Data Science, Global Pharmaceutical Company
Mark Fourman has a remarkable ability to distill the latest behavioral science research into high-impact leadership behaviors. To ensure lasting behavior change, he created practical tools for leaders to use back at work. Two years after delivering the program, I encountered a senior administrator who had attended the training. She stopped me and said, ‘I’ve still got the skill card, and I’m about to use it!’ I would wholeheartedly recommend his programs to any organization committed to enhancing team performance and cross-functional collaboration. — Senior Director, Talent and Organization Development, Columbia University Medical Center
Summary
Beyond Boundaries isn’t just another development program—it’s a launchpad for you and your team to drive meaningful impact across departmental boundaries. In today’s complex business environment, this allows you to:
- Break down silos across teams and functions
- Drive execution that applies functional excellence to organizational priorities
- Strengthen internal engagement through trust and alignment
- Build the collaborative muscle required to succeed in matrix environments
- Advance cross-functional initiatives while maintaining functional expertise
- Build productive partnerships with external stakeholders and customers
While every team and function faces unique challenges, the principles and frameworks consistently drive meaningful results. In our detailed case study, you’ll see how one organization transformed their cross-functional collaboration, strengthened stakeholder relationships, and built sustainable new capabilities.
By equipping your team with practical frameworks, actionable tools, and ongoing support, you’ll create lasting organizational change that extends well beyond your immediate function.
Ready to Transform Your Organization?
Discover how The Big Picture Program can help your teams build stronger partnerships, enhance stakeholder engagement, and drive business impact.
Contact us to discuss your organization’s challenges and how our proven approach can be tailored to your needs.