Secureworks is a cybersecurity firm specializing in threat intelligence detection and response. The company offers advance threat and critical asset protection, compliance and cybersecurity risk management, and security operations services.
In 2017, Mike Cote, CEO, began a multi-year strategic change from a largely services driven business model to a largely Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) business model. The transformation led to changes in the leadership team (50% turnover), pace of research and development, marketing and sales processes, and a shift from a culture driven by efficiency to a culture driven by innovation.
To improve team performance, Secureworks introduced Conversant’s DecisionStyles assessment for executive team members that helped them see each others’ strengths more clearly and allowed each leader to know and understand one another in new ways.
Executive coaching for the CEO, the President, and the Chief Operating Officer supported them in creating a climate in which integrating new and old executives was an occasion for learning, personal growth, and unprecedented strategic alignment.
We worked with the entire executive team on the timing and quality of the conversations they have with one another, with the people they lead, with customers, and with board members. Using the Cycle of Value: Align, Act, Adjust and the Conversation Meter, they learned to diagnose situations, predict trends and prescribe solutions to practice effective change leadership and address alignment challenges.
Following Secureworks’ strategy implementation and partnership with Conversant, the entire company is focused on “innovating faster than the threat actors” in order to achieve cybersecurity.
Most strategies fail in implementation because they are developed in isolation from the leaders responsible for executing them. When strategy is handed down rather than co-created, alignment is shallow — leaders understand the directive but lack the commitment or context to drive it through their teams. Execution also breaks down when strategic priorities are not translated into specific behavioral expectations, and when leaders lack the conversational tools to surface misalignment and resolve it before it compounds into visible organizational failure.
Leadership behavior is the primary determinant of how strategy lands at every organizational level. When senior leaders visibly model the behaviors the strategy requires — faster decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, a shift from efficiency to innovation — those behaviors cascade downward through the organization. When they do not, strategy exists on paper but not in practice. Conversant’s work with Secureworks demonstrated this directly: executive behavior change, driven through coaching and the Cycle of Value framework, was the catalyst for the company’s unprecedented strategic alignment and SaaS business model transformation.
Strategy becomes action through conversation — the decisions leaders make together, the expectations they set clearly, and the misalignments they surface and resolve in real time. A strategy document does not change behavior; a leader who holds clear, purposeful, and well-timed conversations with their team does. Conversant’s Conversation Meter and Cycle of Value (Align, Act, Adjust) tools help executive teams assess the quality of their strategic dialogue, diagnose where alignment is breaking down, and intervene before execution gaps widen into organizational failure.
Senior leader alignment requires more than agreement on a strategy document. It requires a shared understanding of why the strategy matters, what it demands from each leader personally, and how competing priorities will be resolved when they surface. Structured alignment processes — including executive team coaching, shared strategy narrative development, and tools like DecisionStyles — help leadership teams move from nominal agreement to genuine shared commitment. At Secureworks, this produced strategic alignment that the CEO described as stronger than any point in the company’s history.
Successful enterprise strategy implementation is characterized by visible senior leadership behavior that signals the change is real; clear accountability structures connecting strategic priorities to individual and team decisions; and rapid, constructive responses to misalignment when it emerges. At Secureworks, the multi-year shift from a services model to a SaaS business model succeeded because the executive team learned to align, act, and adjust in real time — a capability built through executive coaching, peer assessment via DecisionStyles, and deliberate practice using Conversant’s Cycle of Value framework.
