Navigating Through Culture Transformation

The Situation

A large global consultancy was helping the leadership team of a multi-billion turnover media distribution business to transform their culture so they could achieve their goals for the future.

They'd been having regular meetings to start moving the culture change forward. They had come up with a vision and some key goals they wanted to achieve.

The lead consultant realised that, although the leadership team seemed to understand the need for change intellectually, members of the team had differing views on the transformation, and some had shared insights in confidence which were quite concerning. But in meetings about the transformation everything seemed fine - nobody was raising any significant concerns.

Our Input

This made the consultant concerned that the transformation was going to go off track and could fail because people weren't aligned even at this early stage, as well as being distracted by their other day to day priorities.

They knew that somehow they needed to get everyone aligned and focussed on the right priorities and, to achieve this, they planned a senior team workshop to work through what was needed.

One key goal for the workshop was to bring out the true perceptions of the client team so they could face into them together and move forward, and they knew they needed to find a way to make it a safe environment otherwise nobody would speak up. They weren't sure how they would achieve this.

Until finally
When searching for ideas, the consultant found the Change Journey Navigator by Applied Change.

They tried the free version, loved the way it drew on so many change success factors they already recognised, and how it felt so easy to use. They saw immediately how it could help their client.

Time was short - It was Wednesday and the workshop was planned for Monday afternoon, but they were determined to make it work so they got in touch to see how we could help.

With a bit of coaching on framing the transformation and ensuring they had the right people involved, they had their assessment up and running and the invites were sent out to all 18 participants by Thursday morning.

A few gentle reminders later, everyone had responded and the results were ready for a review call between Applied Change and the consultant on the Friday afternoon, just 2 days after getting in touch.

Using the detailed results and the tailored insights provided in the review call, the consultant now had a clear understanding of the areas needing attention, and all the collateral to use in the workshop with their client.

Outcomes

This helped to make the workshop a real success, the consultant was able to challenge their client team to really reflect on and face into the insights revealed.

The team loved it. They realised that they'd been unintentionally undermining their culture transformation before it had even got started.

The anonymised insights had helped them to see that they each had worries about the change, not all of which had been shared openly. They were surprised to find that their views on how well the vision fitted with the company values were polarised - something they hadn't previously felt the need to focus on. They also realised they had completely overlooked their goals and objectives and these were now in conflict with the culture change vision.

By the end of the workshop, they had discussed candidly these previously unseen challenges and they had a prioritised plan to make things better.

They had avoided several pitfalls, saving time and money by being able to focus on those few critical priorities that would get their culture change off to a flying start.