When you intend to use culture as a management
tool for supporting business performance, it is
also critical that the work is credible and valued
by business leaders. It must not duplicate, ignore,
or undermine previous work. The Walking the Talk
Culture Management System is tailored by our
consulting partners to match your starting point
and deliver maximum effectiveness.

These are the most frequent considerations resolved by our consulting partners in consultation with clients:

• First time doing work on culture: If your organisation is at this point, you will need to focus
  on getting buy-in for this investment. Take the time to clearly define the business imperative,
  to identify how people must behave differently to achieve it, and the values and beliefs that
  must underpin these. This work can be achieved through facilitated sessions with the
  executive team.

• How to implement values: We use the BE-DO-HAVE model to help translate values into
  tangible behaviours, decisions, priorities, and systems. Our assessment process looks carefully
  at your organisation’s values hierarchy and provides practical ideas for implementing, measuring,
  and aligning values into action.

• How to align culture to strategy: When your organisation has defined strategies that represent
  a change from the past, it is a good time to focus on culture. Our Culture Management System
  defines the behaviours the strategy needs, and delivers the changes to the culture to support
  these. Without these, performance is at risk.

• Good diagnostics, unclear implementation: There are many great assessment tools in the market,
  but not many good implementation plans. Your Walking the Talk consulting partner will help you
  extract relevant data to build the best culture plan for your objectives. We have experience with
  Barretts, Human Synergistic, Hewitts Engagement, Great Place to Work, and other tools.

• Multiple consultants and/or frameworks: Different consultants have different ways of working
  with values, behaviours, and culture, and individual business units will develop their own approaches.
  The Walking the Talk Culture Management System is content-neutral, so that you can use it to
  integrate existing initiatives and not reinvent the wheel. Our priority is training your leaders and
  culture champions how to implement and use the process consistently.

• Linking culture to branding work: If your goal is to explicitly demonstrate how culture is the internal
  expression of brand values and how behaviour with customers aligns to the brand promise, your
  culture work will be led by a close-knit alliance between Marketing and HR. Brand data should be
  included in the assessment data used for culture planning and branding initiatives should be linked
  to culture initiatives.

• Linking to established leadership curriculum: Leadership development is one of the most powerful
  levers available to build the culture you want. Current leadership programmes should already be
  contributing to your target culture. Your culture assessment will provide feedback on leadership
  programme effectiveness and then can be more closely aligned to the culture priorities.

• Lots of communication – now what?: “Talk” is the easy part. Achieving the “Walk” is the primary
  contribution of our Culture Management System. If you have done lots of communication of values
  or cultural goals, you have lifted the bar. Delivering on the “walk” becomes all the more important.

• If you’re already measuring engagement: Working on culture goes to the heart of many frustrations
  employees have with their working life – slow decision making, politics, people not keeping their word,
  ideas not being valued, bureaucracy. Our culture process will uncover the root cause of these characteristics,
  by looking at the values, beliefs and behaviours which are the norm in the company. Work on culture is
  the long-term fix to high engagement.

• How to engage the senior team?: In our experience, you can start on culture management without full
  engagement of the senior team. Our Culture Capability training programmes are a good place to start if
  you don’t have full executive engagement yet. They show you how to calculate the business benefits
  of an investment in culture and how to talk about these to senior executives.

• How to link local culture to head office direction: Your global or national organisation (or both) will
  have already communicated a set of values which may not be linked to a programme to help these come
  alive. The Walking the Talk methodology takes into account global influences. We measure their impact
  in our Culture Assessment, and you will consider their contribution as you move through the
  Culture Planning Process.