Mercedes-Benz has long been synonymous with engineering excellence, precision, and performance. As the organisation continued to evolve in a fast-shifting automotive landscape marked by electrification, digital transformation, and global complexity; it also recognised a parallel imperative: strengthening women's leadership presence at senior levels without forcing conformity to legacy leadership norms.
The challenge was not competence or ambition. Women leaders were highly capable, driven, and experienced but many were navigating invisible gendered tensions around authority, visibility, and influence within a historically male-dominated industry. These tensions often showed up as over-adaptation, self-monitoring, or restrained leadership expression, subtly limiting impact over time.
To address this, Mercedes-Benz partnered with Invincible You to implement NavigateHer, a six-month women's leadership journey grounded in the Coherence Code™ focused on translating inner identity coherence into sustained leadership impact.
Mapping the Identity Beneath Your Leadership
The journey began with the Discover Your Steel™ Assessment, a validated diagnostic that surfaced gender-shaped motivational drivers, leadership reflexes, and identity tensions influencing how women leaders made decisions, used power, and positioned themselves in the system. This wasn't about competencies or skills gaps; it was about uncovering the invisible forces shaping leadership choices. The assessment created a precise intent clarity baseline, revealing where leaders were over-adapting, under-claiming authority, or expending energy managing perception instead of driving outcomes. It made the unconscious conscious, establishing a foundation for all transformation work to follow.
Leadership Labs: Embodying Intent Through Coherence in Action
These immersive, face-to-face leadership labs transformed awareness into practice. Through role-play, somatic regulation, and facilitated reflection using the Coherence Code™, leaders practiced holding authority without self-dilution, making decisions without excessive justification, and regulating emotional responses under pressure so presence matched strategic intent. This is where inner coherence began translating into org-level clarity, reducing mixed signals and strengthening leadership in live, high-stakes contexts.
Coaching Circles: Amplifying Impact Through Collective Coherence
Coaching circles functioned as living laboratories for the Coherence Code™. Rather than offering advice in isolation, these circles helped women leaders actively translate inner identity clarity into outward leadership impact. As participants worked on building strategic networks, seeking sponsors, preparing for promotion conversations, and exercising upward influence, collective mirroring made unconscious identity friction visible and correctable in real time, ensuring these moves came from coherence, not adaptation.
Sustaining Coherence as Daily Leadership Practice
Between interventions, the Invincible You App functioned as the execution bridge, ensuring identity insight translated into day-to-day leadership behaviour. Leaders accessed reflections, prompts, and tools focused on stakeholder engagement, confidence in decision-making, and visibility planning, maintaining the thread between deep identity work and daily measurable impact.
Embedding Identity Coherence as Leadership Discipline
Individual Development Plans extended the work beyond the six-month journey by institutionalizing identity coherence as an ongoing leadership discipline, not a one-time insight. Supported by ongoing app-based reflections and periodic check-ins, the IDPs functioned as a stability mechanism: maintaining alignment between who the leader is becoming, what she is responsible for delivering, and how effectively that intent translates into sustained, measurable impact over time.
Impact
More anchored leadership presence at senior tables
Women leaders moved from self-monitoring and adaptive caution to grounded authority, showing up with clearer voice, steadier decision-making, and greater comfort holding power in influence-heavy forums.
Strategic use of social capital, not relational over-investment
Leaders shifted from informal, effort-heavy relationship building to intentional network activation, leveraging sponsors, cross-functional allies, and decision pathways to move work and ideas forward at scale.
Sustained leadership effectiveness under pressure
By integrating inner coherence with real workplace behaviours, women demonstrated higher resilience during transitions, reduced burnout patterns, and greater consistency in how they led across contexts.
Shift from survival-based adaptation to enterprise-level contribution
Leadership effort moved away from "proving, coping, or fitting in" toward shaping systems, driving strategic conversations, influencing outcomes beyond role boundaries, and contributing to organisational direction.
Outcome
Through NavigateHer, Mercedes-Benz demonstrated how identity-anchored leadership development can strengthen both individual leaders and organisational systems. By integrating inner coherence with practical leadership action, the program enabled women leaders to operate with clarity, confidence, and sustained impact, reinforcing Mercedes-Benz's commitment to leadership excellence in a complex, evolving industry.
