Leading the Turn — Transform Meridian Freight Without Breaking Its People
A four-round, advanced leadership simulation set inside Meridian Freight & Fulfilment plc, a Coventry-based mid-cap UK third-party logistics firm…
About this simulation
A four-round, intermediate leadership simulation set inside Talea Digital Solutions, a Barcelona-based B2B software and digital-services firm (EUR 78M revenue, 16% EBITDA, 640 employees). Three weeks ago the board promoted Elena Roig, a respected 39-year-old delivery director, to Managing Director of Enterprise Platforms — 280 people and 60% of revenue.
The colleagues she relied on for candid advice are now her direct reports; one is the internal rival who also wanted the job. The chair is hers, and it is lonely.
On her first full week the board hands her a non-negotiable commitment: deliver Project Atlas (a EUR 9.2M re-platform for the firm's largest client) by a fixed 30 November 2026 go-live — already 5 weeks behind an 8-week runway — or trigger a EUR 1.8M penalty and risk the EUR 4M annual renewal.
Engagement has slid from 74 to 61, four senior engineers are flight-risks, 23 decisions are queued on Elena's desk, approval cycle time has tripled from 2 to 6 days, and Elena's leader-wellbeing index sits at 42/100 while she works 70+ hours a week.
Playing Elena's leadership group, you (1) diagnose the isolation trap and separate symptoms from the root cause; (2) build the support architecture — coach, peer board, chief of staff, delegation with decision rights and protected recovery — investing a scarce pool of Elena's hours and a support budget; (3) run six live decisions under deadline pressure (Atlas recovery, the rival, the board's amber-vs-green call, a resignation threat, the weekend, candor with the team); and (4) institutionalise a 90-day sustainable operating model and present it to the board sponsor.
The math rewards the concept's correct strategy — treat isolation not effort as the binding constraint, delegate with escalation thresholds, couple wellbeing to delivery, choose honest amber, and repair the rival — and measurably punishes the hero trap, abdication-by-delegation, burning the team for the date, green theatre and avoiding the rival.
Final KPIs track Team Engagement, Leader-Wellbeing, Decision Quality and Delivery on Target, with Elena's hours used against a sustainable cap and the support budget committed against EUR 120k.
Who it is for
An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.
How a session runs
- The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
- Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
- The simulation can be run in English, Español.
- The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.