Strengthening Connected Leadership at MSD
The context
MSD invited One Breath to design and deliver a customized offsite workshop for its Leadership Team and CEO. The session was created at an important moment for the team, following a period of significant change and evolving dynamics. The aim was to create a structured space for the team to pause, reconnect, and strengthen alignment, trust, and communication as they moved forward together.
The challenge
For leadership teams, effectiveness is shaped not only by expertise and strategic direction, but also by the quality of communication, the level of trust in the room, and the way people respond to challenge and pressure together. As teams evolve and responsibilities grow, it becomes increasingly valuable to revisit the foundations that support strong collaboration and connected leadership.
In MSD’s case, the workshop was designed to help the team strengthen those foundations in a thoughtful and practical way. The intention was to create space to reflect on alignment, trust, communication, and shared responsibility, while also exploring what it means to lead with care in a senior team environment. This included looking at how leaders communicate with one another, how they approach honest and direct conversations, and how everyday interactions shape the broader team culture.
This kind of work is particularly relevant for senior leadership teams operating in complex environments. Strong results depend not only on sound decisions, but also on the relational climate in which those decisions are made and carried forward. When leaders are able to communicate clearly, listen with greater attention, and engage in brave conversations with both candor and care, they create stronger conditions for coherence, trust, and effective execution.
The workshop was therefore designed as an investment in team effectiveness and long-term collaboration. MSD recognized the value of creating a dedicated moment for reflection and dialogue, giving the leadership team the opportunity to strengthen how they work together and how they lead others through change and complexity.
The methodology
One Breath designed a customized offsite workshop that combined leadership development, experiential facilitation, guided reflection, practical frameworks, and open dialogue. The session was tailored to the team’s context and shaped around the outcomes MSD wanted to support. Our intention was to create an experience that felt grounded, relevant, and immediately applicable to the team’s day-to-day leadership reality.
The workshop included a mix of science-based insight, reflective exercises, facilitated discussion, partner dialogue, and practical takeaways. The design helped participants move beyond abstract concepts and connect the themes directly to their own leadership habits, team dynamics, and ways of working together.
Key elements of the workshop included:
Trust and team connection
Participants explored the behaviors that strengthen trust within leadership teams and reflected on how trust is built, reinforced, or weakened through everyday patterns of communication, follow-through, openness, and presence.
Communication under pressure
The session examined how stress and pressure can affect tone, assumptions, listening, and interpersonal reactions. Through reflection and dialogue, the team considered how to communicate with greater clarity and intention, especially when stakes are high or perspectives differ.
Brave conversations with candor and care
A central part of the experience focused on how leaders can engage in honest, direct, and respectful conversations when discussing sensitive issues, disagreement, or feedback. The session invited participants to reflect on embracing radical candor as a way of speaking openly while also showing care personally, helping create the conditions for stronger accountability, greater trust, and dialogue focused on growth.
Leading with care
One of the key themes of the session was the meaning of care in leadership. The conversation explored how care can be expressed in a professional setting through attention, respect, support, accountability, and the quality of everyday interactions.
Shared responsibility for team culture
Participants reflected on the idea that team culture is shaped continuously through daily actions and choices. This helped reinforce a shared understanding that the quality of the team environment is created collectively, through consistent leadership behavior.
Experiential reflection and dialogue
The session created space for leaders to pause, listen deeply, and engage with one another in a different way than is often possible in the pace of day-to-day work. This experiential dimension was essential, because stronger team dynamics are supported not only by new ideas, but also by new experiences of connection and reflection.
Our methodology focuses on both dimensions that matter in leadership development: the inner dimension, how leaders regulate themselves, reflect, and show up, and the relational dimension, how they communicate, influence, support, and collaborate with others. This combination is especially valuable for leadership teams, where the quality of interaction often shapes the quality of decision-making, alignment, and execution.
The impact
The workshop gave MSD’s Leadership Team a valuable opportunity to pause, reconnect, and strengthen the conditions that support effective leadership together. It created space for meaningful dialogue and helped reinforce a shared understanding of how trust, communication, care, and shared responsibility shape team effectiveness.
More specifically, the session supported:
Greater awareness of how communication patterns influence trust and collaboration
Stronger reflection on what connected leadership looks like in everyday practice
More intentional thinking around brave conversations and radical candor
A deeper shared understanding of care as a leadership behavior
Reinforced alignment around the kind of team culture the leadership group wants to create
Space for meaningful dialogue during an important phase of team development
This collaboration reflects an important truth about leadership development. Senior teams benefit from creating time to strengthen not only strategic alignment, but also the human dynamics that support strong performance over time. By investing in this kind of experience, MSD created an opportunity for its leadership team to deepen connection, improve the quality of dialogue, and build stronger foundations for collaboration moving forward.
We are proud to design and facilitate experiences that help teams strengthen both performance and human connection. Our work with MSD is a strong example of how leadership development can support more thoughtful communication, stronger trust, and more connected leadership in practice.
If you’d like to explore how similar team-building work can support your teams or leadership groups, check out our work and schedule an introductory call.