Our consulting approach is designed to conscientiously guide your organisation to cultural transformation, whilst at the same time building the competency within your business to support, manage, lead and measure culture.
Working with Walking the Talk embeds culture management skills within your business management processes so you can deliver consistent results, despite changes in strategy or executive teams. After all, your culture is a living, breathing entity that requires constant care if it is to flourish.
Our consulting solutions are customised to meet the specific
Our approach:
It is a logical, objective approach to an intuitive, subjective issue. As one of our clients said: we’ve developed a left-brain solution for a right-brain problem.
Our methodology sits at the heart of our Culture Transformation System and covers the four key areas we believe are vital to bring about culture transformation.
We call it the Equation for Change:
Whether you’re defining a business strategy or a culture strategy, you need three things; an understanding of where you are, an understanding of where you want to be, and an understanding of the journey you’ll need to take to get there.
Our Culture Design process provides the insights you need to define your culture strategy. It also lays the foundation for a targeted action plan to deliver your business goals.
Walking the Talk has a range of tried-and-tested tools that provide you with the most thorough culture assessment possible. From working through an intensive one-day workshop with your executive team to define the required target culture, to conducting qualitative and quantitative assessments that help you understand the what and why of your current culture across the business, to providing you with a uniquely-tailored culture blueprint that will guide all future work.
You can measure and monitor your culture as you can any aspect of your business - don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Brand management was once thought to be an intangible corporate asset, and yet look at how businesses now invest in and manage their brands. At Walking the Talk, we have a fierce belief that you can do the same thing with your culture.
Working side by side with your internal team we will:
The leadership of your organisation plays a vital part in the shaping, role modelling and leading of your culture's transformation.
Too often leadership see their role as simply defining the new culture, rather than truly living and leading it. Operating at a corporate, team and individual level, we take your leadership team through a practical program to build their cultural leadership skills. To learn to walk their talk.
Individuals gain a deeper appreciation of how their personal beliefs and behaviours shape the culture around them. Teams find new ways to collaborate and communicate about culture. The business becomes more aware of whether decisions taken are reflective of the desired culture, or entrenched in the old culture.
It’s a challenging and rewarding journey of transformation for executives, on both a personal and a collective level.
This is the phase most organisations put the most effort and investment towards in order to create a ‘buzz’ about the new cultural paradigm. It’s also where most cultural transformations stumble and fail. All the effort goes into creating a shiny, new, ‘talk,’ without ensuring that it’s aligned with the ‘walk’.
Our approach to informing, exciting and engaging people about the new required behaviours is controlled, exact and effective.
We focus our work on those key individuals in your business that are already attuned to the new culture norms or can readily influence those around them. Training, workshops and support give these individuals the ability to reach out and engage others in the business.
Combined with the Lead stream, this approach forms an unstoppable momentum towards a new, transformed culture.
Cultures are unique and we think a consulting solution should fit your organisation like a glove. At Walking the Talk, we provide an end-to-end, made-to-measure culture solution that’s tailored to your business needs.
We’ve been pioneering this work for over 25 years, which means we know what works, and what doesn’t.Alongside consulting, we also offer stand-alone, customisable products to accelerate culture transformation best practice.
TAP is an intensive half-day workshop run with your Executive Team focussed on identifying the culture the organisation needs in order to deliver the business strategy.
TAP cleverly links your business objectives to the behaviours required to deliver them, whilst building consensus across the executive team for the target culture you need. You’ll leave the workshop with a stake in the ground; a target for transformation that will inform and guide your journey.
Our specially developed online tool helps you rank and prioritise your cultural requirements according to multiple factors.
Pathfinder is an intensive planning period. Through workshops, planning sessions and advice, we help your culture transformation team build a comprehensive roadmap for success.
Pathfinder applies the rigours found in business planning to culture planning, whilst building the culture smarts of your culture transformation team.
Pathfinder is all about action. We show your team how to set culture strategies, develop tactical plans, allocate resources and how to set all-important metrics for tracking and reviewing progress. We also introduce them to 9 Levers they can pull to accelerate culture results.
CCI is an online quantitative culture mapping survey that yields comparative data about your culture from across the organisation. Our survey is grounded in our Culture Archetypes, but we can, and have, tailored our report to reflect behaviours defined by our clients.
The culture survey brings together a rich data set from across your divisions, regions and employee levels, to give you the most detailed picture possible.
Conducting a CCI gives you a clear insight into the nature of your current culture, and into the culture your people believe needs to be in place to deliver on your business strategy. It reveals points of cultural difference across your organisation, and will let you know your readiness for driving forward transformation. At the end of the process, you’ll receive a comprehensive report and full data set which can form the foundation of an annual cultural health check.
We recommend running a CCI and a TAP together. If TAP defines where you want to go a CCI shows you how far you have to go.
Discover is our qualitative, deep-dive, culture diagnostic tool.
We run expertly-facilitated, 2-hour focus groups with a cross section of your employees to reveal the beliefs and values that drive your culture.
Understanding the deeper drivers of culture is the foundation of genuine transformation. Discover provides a safe environment for your employees to share the values and beliefs they see in action.
The process provides profound insight into why your culture is the way it is. Discover goes below the surface of what you see in action and gets right inside the head and heart of the organisation.
Habi is the little app that can bring about a big change in habits.
It allows individuals and teams to track behaviour on a daily basis. Habi can provide company-wide metrics on your progress towards culture transformation and can drive habit formation.
Habi provides real-time support for employees in their formation of positive new habits and behavioural patterns. Habi has over 40 behavioural categories, from collaboration to achievement, ownership to innovation.
Individuals, teams, or the whole organisation, sets the app to track the behaviours they want to adopt. Then, by running quick real-time pulses they can check whether that behaviour was displayed.
Habi also gives you access to daily personalised coaching tips and reading ideas, so that you can really master your chosen habit.
Foundation is an intensive 1-day workshop that introduces participants to culture concepts and culture management methodology.
Foundation creates a common language, framework and understanding for your organisation to discuss, plan and manage culture. Participants leave with an understanding of how culture is created, how it can be changed, how to manage it, and how it can help to deliver the organisation’s business goals.
Foundation marries our framework with your reality. Your challenges form the basis for many of our practical exercises.
Lead is a 1 or 2-day workshop that immerses participants in a deeper understanding of culture transformation, and specifically, their role in leading it.
Lead builds knowledge of how to use symbols and systems to establish culture as a team leader. It challenges individuals to explore and understand their own leadership styles and the impact they can have on culture management.
Not all points of influence in an organisation come from the leadership down. The Influence program focuses on the importance of building skills in peer-to-peer influence. It’s a process that involves workshops to build engagement and culture management skills.
Creates alignment and buy-in to the target culture across this pivotal organisational group. The program captures their inherent power for the purpose of culture transformation.
Participants leave with an understanding of how culture is created, how it can be changed, how to manage it, and how it can help to deliver the organisation’s business goals. We also explore the deeper beliefs of the BE-level as they recognise how they can successfully contribute to change.
Merge is a 1-day workshop focused on quickly building the understanding and capability that your leaders and your merger team will need to successfully bring together two different cultures.
Mergers and acquisitions are unique events that cause cultural reverberations throughout both organisations. Our Merge program gives you the tools you need to have an effective dialogue, build common values and establish a new common cultural does. Think of it as marriage counselling.
We often recommend that an organisation undertaking a Merge program also run a culture assessment. If the Merge program creates the skills to make good culture management decisions, a culture assessment provides the data you need to ensure those decisions are based on fact.
A facilitated process of interventions with the Executive Team which is structured to cover four dimensions of team performance: I, US, WE, and IT.
Our best results are achieved when a team commits to an on-going program of work, but we do provide facilitation of one-off workshops,
The ‘I’ dimension considers the individual and their leadership shadow, this can involve 360 degree feedback, individual coaching and individual behaviour development.
The ‘US’ dimension builds trust within the Executive Team. The tools and training we provide improve open dialogue, encourage greater levels of personal disclosure and build effective team habits. The team work on their collective leadership shadow (read about the Shadow of the Leader here) and reach consensus decisions as to how best to influence culture transformation as one voice.
The ‘WE” dimension covers the impact the executive has on the organisation, and helps them to lead a culture transformation by considering the impact they have on how others behave.
Strategy, goals and business planning are reviewed as part of the ‘IT’ dimension. It is a constant drumbeat of alignment between strategy and culture.
Together I-US-WE-IT provides a powerful force for the Executive that really does bring together the walk and the talk.
You’ve identified and defined the behaviours your business needs to embed in the organisation to deliver your business targets. The Key Behaviour Program is a tailored 1-day workshop that educates and engages everyone in your business as to these new behavioural requirements.
The Key Behaviour Program builds a critical mass of people displaying the new behaviours. It creates a common language; common skills set and common understanding from leadership through to front line staff.
It’s an informative, exciting and engaging process that builds enthusiasm for transformation in participants.
To deliver culture transformation, the Key Behaviour Program should always be part of a wider range of activities. We work carefully with clients to ensure the program is aligned with other initiatives.
Habi is the little app that can bring about a big change in habits. It allows individuals and teams to track behaviour on a daily basis. Habi can provide company-wide metrics on your progress towards culture transformation and can drive habit formation
Habi provides real-time support for employees in their formation of positive new habits and behavioural patterns. Habi has over 40 behavioural categories, from collaboration to achievement, ownership to innovation.
Individuals, teams, or the whole organisation, sets the app to track the behaviours they want to adopt. Then, by running quick real-time surveys you can check whether that behaviour was displayed.
Habi also gives you access to daily personalised coaching tips and reading ideas, so that you can really master your chosen habit.
Become a part of our network and receive the latest insights and tips on culture leadership, managing and supporting organisational culture transformation.
Contact us to leave a message.Head office: +31 (0) 20 520 6872
Europe: +44 (0) 207 100 6999
Asia Pacific: +61 2 8310 5285
Latin America: +55 11 99302 1203