There is a certain order in the phases, but then again, every organisation is different. The work you have done may have taken you further on your culture journey. We work closely with you to adapt our approach to your specific needs.
Diagnose your current culture and define the culture you need to deliver your strategy.
When you define your culture change strategy you need three things:
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.
You need to measure and monitor your culture as you would do with any other aspect of your business. We help you develop a Culture Plan to successfully pilot your culture work.
Turn your leaders into role models of the target culture
Too often leaders 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.
We support your leaders to become role models of the culture you want to see - to learn to walk their talk on a personal and collective journey.
Build the tipping point for change in the whole organisation
We design the best solution to scale up your culture transformation and form an unstoppable movement for change.
We build a combination of fully digital, hybrid, or facilitated solutions to equip your managers with the mindsets and tools to put new behaviours into practice.
We bring a playbook of engagement and test-and-learn strategies to define the best approach for your unique situation.
One of the first and most common issues that we find in our work with our clients is the lack of clarity about what culture is – and isn’t. So, we’ve selected a definition that is directly actionable, because it contains everything you need to do to shift culture.
As humans, we’re tribal animals. We want to fit in, so we look for signals about how we are supposed to behave, and we adapt our behaviour according to those messages. That’s why our work on culture is strongly anchored in behaviours.
Culture is completely do-able. Organisations can actually manage their culture like any other enabler of the business. At Walking the Talk we’ve created a practical easy-to-use culture system with simple concepts and tools that give you everything you need to design the culture you need and implement it seamlessly.
Our work is based on a number of key principles, which we have learned from our experience of working on culture for over 25 years.
We believe in “culture by design, not culture by chance”.
If your culture does not fully support your strategy, you are less likely to achieve the results you want than if your culture and your strategy are aligned.
Make culture the superpower that boosts your performance.
There are several approaches to encouraging the behaviours you want to see in your culture. Working on all of them simultaneously reinforces the message you are sending to your people, either consciously or unconsciously. That’s why we work on processes, systems, and symbols as well.
Many of our human behaviours are driven by our beliefs, our values and our mindsets. At Walking the Talk, we call this the BE level. Without tackling this BE level, your initiatives will fall on stony ground and the new culture will not take hold. We shift mindsets to shift behaviours faster.
With great power comes great responsibility. A leader, like a butterfly, can flap their wings and cause a hurricane. We call this the leadership shadow. Most leaders we meet underestimate the length and breadth of their shadow. Building awareness and capability at the leadership level to understand the cultural reverberations of their shadow is vital in our cultural transformation work.
This is another one of our little secrets: The more you embrace, the less you achieve. This may not be true for everything, but it certainly is for culture. If you try to shift too many behaviours and too many mindsets at the same time, progress will be slow and, in most cases, little happens. We support our clients to identify the most critical shifts that need to take place and we help them to focus their effort on this shift – to speed up the change – and almost nothing else.
Head Office / Europe:
+31 (0) 20 240 2233
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+1 (0) 212 417 0221
UK: +44 (0) 207 100 6999
Asia Pacific: +61 (2) 8310 5285
Brazil & Latin America: +55 (11) 932 500 683
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