1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Fidelity had brought together a newly formed Senior Leadership Team — around ten senior directors drawn from different geographies, some of whom had worked together before, many of whom hadn't. They arrived with genuinely diverse leadership styles, experiences, and ways of working, and the goal was to turn that collection of capable individuals into a cohesive, high-performing leadership group.
The brief named what that required: building familiarity and trust, helping leaders understand each other's working styles and strengths, encouraging openness and collaboration, aligning around shared purpose, and enabling adaptability to different leadership approaches. Underlying all of it was a specific tension the client called out directly — collective ownership over competition, and collective success over individual wins. That's a live issue in any room of senior directors, where everyone has succeeded by being individually excellent.
The second touchpoint added a further dimension. Where Day 1 was a structured, in-office session for the core ten, the evening engagement opened up to 35–40 people including L2 leaders — a much larger, more informal setting where the newly formed SLT would be seen leading in front of their wider organisation.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Cricket Auction League was chosen for the second touchpoint because it delivers a decision-making lesson inside a genuinely social, high-energy format — exactly right for an evening engagement at an external venue.
Teams enter a live auction with a fixed budget, bidding to build a high-performing squad of at least seven players, with the highest total stars winning. Under the noise and the fun, it's a pressure test of collective decision-making: a limited budget forces prioritisation, high-value players carry high-value risk, and internal alignment before placing a bid separates a balanced squad from a budget spent on one marquee name.
For Fidelity's brief, the fit is precise. The simulation surfaces the collaboration-over-competition theme without anyone having to name it — teams chasing individual instincts burn their budget and end up unbalanced, while teams that agree a strategy and commit to it collectively build the stronger side. Participants experience directly that success is not about individual stars but about building the right team and deciding together. Delivered in an informal evening setting, it also let the SLT and the wider leadership group mix and make decisions side by side, extending the familiarity and trust built on Day 1 into the broader organisation.
Day 1 laid the groundwork with a customised Terminal Quest Challenge — deliberately designed for a collaborative rather than competitive outcome — in which three teams each solved an envelope puzzle contributing to a larger shared image, culminating in a Big Reveal collaborative finale where the separate pieces resolved into one visual symbolising the group's leadership values.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
Day 1 ran as a 90-minute structured session at Fidelity's Gurugram office: an icebreaker and energiser, team formation into three groups, the Terminal Quest Challenge with VR integration, a puzzle assembly challenge, the Big Reveal collaborative finale, and a debrief. The design was deliberate — each team's envelope puzzle contributed to a shared image none could complete alone, so the finale demonstrated interdependence rather than declaring a winner. Group photographs and video were captured throughout, with printed photographs distributed to participants on the day.
Day 2 opened up two days later at an external venue, running 60 minutes from 6 PM with 35–40 participants — the SLT joined by L2 leaders. The Cricket Auction League ran as the centrepiece, followed by a leadership and decision-making debrief drawing on what facilitators had observed in how teams aligned, prioritised, and committed under budget pressure. The session also showcased the Day 1 highlight video, connecting the two touchpoints into a single leadership journey and letting the wider group see what the SLT had begun together.
Throughout, the debriefs stayed on Fidelity's stated themes: leadership alignment towards a common outcome, trust and familiarity within the group, understanding diverse leadership approaches, collaboration over competition, responding to uncertainty and disruption, and collective success versus individual wins.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Cricket Auction League gave Fidelity's leadership group a shared, high-energy demonstration of the theme the whole intervention was built around: the winning team is rarely the one with the flashiest individual picks, but the one that agrees a strategy and commits to it together. Delivered informally to a wider group of 35–40, it extended the trust built on Day 1 out into the broader leadership community.
Across two connected touchpoints, the intervention moved a newly formed senior leadership team from a group of accomplished individuals toward a cohesive "A-"team"—and gave the wider leadership group a shared reference point for what collective ownership actually looks like in practice.