Culture – The Key To Successful Execution
Situation
A senior management team had developed a new commercial strategy that required the business to be much more agile, adaptable, and responsive to change, as well as being more cost conscious in its decision making. Unless long standing organisational behaviours and ways of working rapidly changed, the team’s ability to implement the strategy successfully would be seriously jeopardised.
Tasks
- Measure the current organisational values and behaviours (culture)
- Use the insights generated to create an action plan for changing some established ways of working
- Start the process of adapting the culture through an incremental, step-by-step approach so the desired values and behaviours are fully ‘lived’ by all employees
Actions
- A market leading cultural diagnostic tool was introduced
- A simple, quick and engaging questionnaire was prepared and then completed by all employees
- The key findings were discussed in focus groups
- Insights from the cultural assessment informed an action plan, which included leadership communication programmes that improved awareness and uptake of the desired values and behaviours
Results
- The senior management team got a much deeper understanding of the underlying reasons why the business was not sufficiently responsive and adaptable, and what to do about it
- Employees understood and bought in to the proposed new ways of working, and organisational values and behaviours started to change in a measured way
- This led to higher levels of engagement
- Potential barriers to the execution of the commercial strategy were addressed
