Every growing business becomes more complex over time. Interlinked processes, increasing risks, silos and globalisation are some of the factors reinforcing complexity. This complexity slows you down and makes you difficult to do business with.
What is the risk to your business if you are not able to quickly pivot to respond to new customer needs?
• Your decision-making has become too slow, making you miss opportunities.
• Your people are fearful or making the wrong decisions and protecting themselves by hiding behind a complexity of processes.
• Your customers are turning to your competitors who are able to faster respond to their changing needs.
• We conduct a Root Cause Analysis of your culture, deep-diving into potential blockers of agility. We help you identify the levers you can pull to unblock complexity and support agility.
• We create an Agile Culture Development Plan and engage your workforce in agile solutions.
• We use our Walking with Agility program to work with your leaders and senior managers to turn them into role models of agility and drivers of change into your organisation.
A merger not only brings together two or more organisations, it also brings together multiple - and unique - cultures. It’s a high-risk situation, but also one that, if managed well, can create exponential value.
Studies show that in 50-70% of cases mergers dilute value. How do you unite different cultures in order to construct a strong culture for the new entity?
• Mergers often accentuate cultural issues that have been tolerated in less pressurised situations.
• Executive focus tends to be on how to integrate the systems, products and processes of the businesses. Without the added lever of culture it is ineffective.
• Addressing the happiness of your workforce is not the same as managing your culture.
• Our Culture Diagnostic helps you be crystal clear about each organisation’s cultural strengths and weaknesses.
• Our Target Culture tool gives you a well-defined culture for the merged entity.
• Our Culture Planning process defines the roadmap to adopt to drive the renewed culture into the merged organisation.
• We facilitate vibrant sessions for entities to understand each other, build respect, and facilitate communication and information sharing across the teams.
When a corporate scandal hits the press it’s rarely an isolated incident, but rather a spike in a pattern of behaviour that already exists within the culture. The result is reputational damage and financial loss. Your challenge is not to merely define corporate values and standards, but to ensure they are truly lived in the day-to-day.
What is the risk to your business if your people are not encouraging the right behaviours and are tolerating the wrong ones?
• Are there behaviours present in your business right now that may give cause for concern? You could be sitting on a time bomb.
• Is culture discussed in the workplace? Companies that have an open dialogue about values, beliefs and behaviours are more adept at managing reputation risk.
• What happens when performance pressure is applied? Where are the risks?
• We run an honest diagnosis of your culture to identify the behaviour risks and what drives them.
• We help you define your values and standards. We make it easy for people to understand the behaviours which are going to be encouraged and discouraged.
• We help you craft a strong culture story.
• We find your culture champions; those people already exhibiting the behaviours you want, and work with them to influence the rest of the organisation.
As your organisation grows, organically or not, you have to hire new people with specific skillsets,. Cultural fit can easily become secondary to an urgent need for the business to acquire such skills. Growth may also mean geographic expansion, or multiple sites. How do you manage culture during rapid growth?
How do you identify and preserve the aspects of your culture that forged its success while at the same time as a wave of new recruits threatens to dilute its cohesiveness?
• Your organisation is a great place to work, but you are not able to say precisely what makes it great. What are the values and beliefs alive in your business?
• Can your people clearly see the link between the culture and your business imperatives?
• Everyone is busy managing the what (growth) but has not time to worry about the how (culture).
• We give you an in-depth understanding of your culture: not only how people do things, but also why they behave the way they do.
• We help you to build a regular culture pulse to make sure you are always on top of how your culture evolves.
• We identify the cultural levers for change and sustainability in your business.
• We help you to develop a culture plan to manage your culture during times of fast growth.
• We train your people on how to manage culture, day-in, day-out.
Your leadership team is not ‘walking the talk’ and this creates cynicism. You have clearly defined cultural aspirations but the lack of alignment at the top makes it difficult to engage the rest of the organisation.
How do you achieve alignment in a group that may have their own agendas, drivers, beliefs and unique personalities? How do you make them role models of the culture you want to have?
• The culture effort is seen by leaders as purely engagement or communication work to be driven by HR.
• Individuals believe the problem lies elsewhere in the business.
• The senior team are failing to walk the talk.
• We help you to review your culture. Are there differences between your stated culture and the reality?
• We build culture leadership capabilities within your leadership team.
• We support your leaders in becoming role models of the culture you want to see. We help them to amplify the behaviours they need.
• We assist your leadership team in becoming more cohesive and high-performing.
Your digital transformation started with a bang but has not delivered all its promises. Processes have been digitalised but the process is stalling and people are resisting the change.
How do you unlock your digital transformation by addressing the deeper behavioural elements?
• Your people are resisting the change and only seeing digital transformation as a threat.
• You leaders believe digital transformation is a technology initiative, not a business issue.
• You are not achieving the economies of scale, increased revenues and customer-centricity you were promised.
How we can help you grab this opportunity
• We help you to assess your digital culture in order to identify the gaps between your reality and where you need to be.
• We build the capability of your leaders to lead in a digital culture, shifting their mindsets and behaviours.
• We train your managers on eight essential skills for digital cultures.
Your strategy is shifting, so you want to make sure that your organisation can fully support your new strategic pillars. You need people to do things differently and you are worried that telling them to do so is not enough. You’re right!
How do you make sure your culture drives people to behave the way you need them in order to implement your strategy successfully?
• Your new strategy needs people to do things differently, but they are resisting the change.
• You are not completely clear on the mindsets and behaviours you need to see in your people to achieve your business imperative.
• Your processes and systems actually drive people to behave differently from what you need for your new strategy.
• We help you to precisely identify the culture you need to align with your strategy.
• We create buy-in in your leadership team.
• We give you an in-depth understanding of your current culture and of the gaps you need to address.
• We help you to develop a culture plan to dial-up the cultural attributes you need for your new strategy.
Your performance has been lagging for a while. Whatever you do does not seem to have a long-lasting and significant impact. You’ve run a variety of initiatives and while people have understood the urgency of increasing performance, but nothing happens.
How do you get your people to change the way they think, feel and act in order to drive superior performance across the organisation?
• Employees keep doing the same things expecting performance to lift, but it’s not improving.
• Accountability is low. People don’t always deliver what they said they would.
• Your people find justifications and excuses as to why results have not been met. The environment is blamed for the lack of growth.
• We help you identify and address the blockers of performance in your culture.
• We develop systemic, symbolic and behavioural initiatives to directly increase performance.
• We increase personal responsibility and accountability in your leaders and managers to make sure they drive real performance and don’t use justifications for non-performance.
Your strategy requires the organisation to be delivering exceptional value to customers. Maybe you are shifting from a product focus to a customer focus. You are clear that everything needs to start with the customer. However your organisation is built from the inside-out.
How do you change mindsets and behaviours to align them fully on the customer?
• Customers say you are not easy to do business with. Your NPS scores are too low.
• Support functions believe their customers are employees.
• There is a lack of clarity of who the customer really is.
• Your processes are complex, built from the inside-out.
• Silos stand in the way of a seamless, powerful customer experience.
• We help you discover the blockers of customer-centricity in your culture (mindsets, behaviours, systems).
• We identify the cultural levers for change in your business.
• We support your leaders in becoming role models of customer-centricity.
• We help you develop a culture plan to boost customer-centricity.
Do you have a question on culture? Get in touch with us to learn more about our organisational culture consultancy services and how you can re-shape your company dynamic for the better.
Head Office / Europe:
+31 (0) 20 240 2233
North America:
+1 (0) 212 417 0221
UK: +44 (0) 207 100 6999
Asia Pacific: +61 (2) 8310 5285
Brazil & Latin America: +55 (11) 932 500 683
(WhatsApp available)