Helping tech leaders role model the behaviours needed to deliver on a new strategy
A global tech company sought our help in shifting its culture to support a new business strategy. Prompted by a divestment and decision to focus on a core market, they wanted to unite the org’s top 70 leaders around a new set of professional standards. Standards those leaders would be expected to role model before the rest of the org was asked to follow suit.
The solution
We ran a consultation with the 70 leaders on how they saw the culture today compared with the new culture they wanted to build. To help us understand what aspects of the culture the team wanted to leave behind and what they wanted to keep, we:
Created a survey that generated 70+ responses
Designed and facilitated a series of focus groups, which were attended by 60 leaders and generated 38,000 words of transcripts
Analysed 47,000 words from the most recent employee engagement survey, to incorporate the voice of the wider employee base
Conversations among leaders had never happened on this scale before, and from this in-depth research, three main themes emerged:
Teams are siloed — even customers have noticed it
People are craving clarity on the vision and strategy
People love a fast pace — bureaucracy is frustrating
The leaders were given the opportunity to discuss how each of the three issues they’d identified was holding them back as an org and what changes they, as a team, needed to make. As ever, we paid close attention not just to what the leaders were saying, but also how they said it. Typical quotes included:
“We have too many silos. Every team is trying to keep everything for themselves. Even within my team, the people don't talk to each other. No matter how much you encourage them, they still don't share the information.”
“We need to find a very clear and simple way to reflect our vision and our strategy to all employees, so they can contribute more. Even on the level of managers, I'm not sure we all focus and agree on the same strategy.”
“When the management machine gets behind something, bureaucracy goes out of the way, and we are very capable of being super agile, super fast and super “do-ey”. However, sometimes culture and process holds us back.”
Words like these fed into a new set of leadership behaviours. A set of practical steps the 70+ leaders could feel they really owned — because they came out of their conversations and used their language.
The outcome
The behaviours we uncovered will not simply be “words on a page”. The leaders have committed to “walk the talk” by living the behaviours before all employees are encouraged to follow suit.
That role modeling will begin by having honest conversations about:
what they currently do well as leaders
where they’re falling short of the desired behaviours
how they can get from where they are now to where they need to be
how they will hold each other accountable for their progress
At the same time, the company is examining everything from recruitment to performance to pay — to ensure the new behaviours we uncovered are embedded into all its HR processes.