Human-centered leadership in practice

The A1 Group is a leading communications provider, and offers products and services in the areas of voice telephony, broadband Internet, mobile and home entertainment as well as smart home, data and IT solutions, wholesale, payment solutions and digital services.

A1 Group is part of América Móvil, has 30+ million customers, and is active in Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Northern Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia.

A1 Group was rolling out its Human@Center (H@C) strategy at scale and faced the challenge of translating leadership principles into everyday behaviors across a large, complex organization.

The challenge was to design a learning experience that would move beyond awareness and motivation, and instead enable leaders to experiment with, practice, and embed new leadership behaviors in real work contexts — supported by internal coaches and a strong learning community.

The goals were to:

• Enable leaders to identify a concrete, behavior-led leadership challenge rooted in their daily work and circle of influence.
• Equip leaders with a practical experimentation mindset and behavioral design tools to test small, meaningful changes in real time.
• Build internal capability through H@C Coaches, ensuring ongoing coaching, reflection, and peer support throughout the experimentation journey.

Hyper Island designed a practice-based Experimentation Journey to help leaders turn the H@C strategy into everyday leadership behaviors. The journey started with an immersive Activation Day, where participants identified a real, behavior-led leadership challenge from their daily work and designed a small experiment to test a new way of leading in practice. For a number of weeks after the Activation Day, the leaders were supported and guided by internal coaches.

To ensure scalability and long-term impact, the program was supported by a Train-the-Trainer approach. Internal H@C Coaches were educated in both facilitation and coaching, enabling them to support leaders through experimentation, reflection, and iteration — and to sustainably scale the journey across the organization.

The Experimentation Journeys revealed strong engagement and ownership among leaders. Participants showed a clear willingness to reflect on their own behaviors and experiment with new ways of leading, while also surfacing tensions around time constraints, habits, and competing priorities.

Leaders translated abstract Human@Center principles into concrete, observable behavior changes. Small, well-designed experiments helped leaders see where change was already possible within their circle of influence, building confidence and momentum through visible progress.

At the organizational level, the Train-the-Trainer approach proved critical. Internal H@C Coaches emerged as trusted facilitators and coaches, enabling sustained learning, peer support, and scalability. The journeys strengthened A1’s internal capability to embed Human@Center leadership behaviors into everyday practice across the organization.