HR Vendors of the Year 2021

Written by Sequoia Core Team | 6 December 2021

We reflect with gratitude on receiving the Bronze Award for 2021 “Best Leadership Development Consultancy”, and finalist of HR Vendors of the Year for “Best Innovation for HR” and “Best Employee Engagement Consultancy”

At the heart of Sequoia’s mission and vision, Sequoia envisions itself as an inspiring brand that empowers organisations and individuals to discover their own enduring sense of purpose through unleashing the collective capacity of people, to create impactful organisational results.

In 2020, spurred by COVID-19 and the changing wider business environment, Sequoia embarked on a firm-wide digital transformation initiative. The digitalization initiatives focused on accelerating key internal business processes and building robust external platforms to enhance our product and service offerings.

Our leadership consultancy espouses that leadership development and business strategy development are not separate, but closely intertwined. With the onset of Circuit Breaker in 2020, the traditional organisational learning disabilities were compounded as systems such as Finance, Procurement, IT, transitioned to a safe and viable digitalisation solution. The needs for mental health, emotional intelligence, development and performance and human aspects of change came up to the fore as the personal and professional boundaries interlinked. In light of this innovation challenge, our partnering approach with the clients suited them as we understood and customised our solutions from one client system to another.

Reflecting on some key outcomes, we saw that:

• Our perspective and essence catalysed our work as we chartered forward with Discovery — Engaging key stakeholders & enabling leaders in bespoke designed solutions that are process driven
• During times when conversation of illness manned the news, we created brave spaces for people to share their Aspirations — to articulate their vision, relating it to the organisational vision, in light of the pandemic.
• We got excellent feedback on our engaging capabilities even on virtual platform, where we created time and space to Activate — to bring people together in strategic conversations, in mindful ways that gives them an opportunity to build relationships when one could no longer meet team members and colleagues.
• Finally, what we have found to be true worked which is to leverage on Invitation — enabling leaders with practical tools to constantly invite and engage more stakeholders.

We developed Sequoia’s Transformational Leadership (STL) Framework, distilling our years of Leadership solutions and integrating them with latest technology and collaborative online tools for our clients.

Through this, Sequoia brought our on-brand service delivery to the next level — we successfully developed high-tech and high-touch solutions, using personalized technology as a means for deeper levels of authentic engagement and higher value-added experiences while maintaining the personal touch, warmth, high engagement and quality of presence that characterized Sequoia’s engagements.

Since then, we have designed and facilitated Leadership solutions integrating diverse styles to meet client needs:

• Full day or half-day virtual workshops,
• Blended engagements where clients meet in small groups and the facilitators meet them virtually,
• In-person workshops respecting social distancing,
• Online synchronous and asynchronous learning,
• Individual / Group Coaching, and
• Action Learning Sets.

In line with our refreshed brand aspiration to be a “beacon of living O.D.” and the success of our virtual deliveries, one of our ongoing key digitalization initatives is in establishing an e-learning platform that liberates our coaching, consulting, training and facilitation expertise to a much wider audience.

This e-learning initiative is intended as an opportunity to expand our brand networks and establish our brand presence in the virtual space, as well as to build learning communities that share in Sequoia’s brand purpose, values and vision for a flourishing community and better world.

At Sequoia, we recognise that we are never just competing on products and services; how we deliver for our customers is as important as what we deliver. As a brand, we seek to stay true to our core values and identity, thus establishing strong resonance with our customer base that we have continued to win the support of a strong clientele base in healthcare, education, and the social sector and also corporate clients with a defined social mission.

Heartfelt thanks to our partners, participants and people for your support through the past 20 years!