Organisational consulting when the organisation itself has to change
Culture, structure and leadership alignment when the plan needs the organisation to work differently, not just the people in it to work harder.
Most organisations don’t fail for lack of ideas. They fail because the leaders aren’t aligned, the culture doesn’t support the strategy, and the change is launched but never embedded. I’m brought in when the strategy has changed and the organisation underneath it hasn’t yet: the values say one thing and the performance system rewards another, the structure was built for the old plan, or several change programmes are running at once and nobody has joined them up.
What this covers
Culture and behaviour
Turning values into behaviours people can recognise, and building them into how performance is managed and leaders are expected to lead, so the culture work and the people systems stop pulling in different directions.
Structure and roles
Organisation design and role clarity when the shape of the organisation no longer fits what it’s trying to do. Who decides what, where the work actually flows, and which roles exist because of history rather than need.
Leadership alignment
Getting the executive team behind one version of the change, and the layer beneath them equipped to carry it. This is where the work most often joins up with team coaching and leadership development.
Joining up change
Organisations rarely run one change at a time. When strategy, culture, structure and development are all in flight, the job is to knit them into something people can follow rather than four initiatives competing for the same attention.
How a piece of work runs
I diagnose what is really happening before proposing anything, usually through conversations across the organisation rather than a survey. I work with the leaders first, because change that the senior team hasn’t agreed among themselves doesn’t survive contact with the rest of the organisation. I design interventions that are practical enough to run without me, and I stay close to implementation, because the design is the easy half.
I don’t do theatre, and I don’t hide behind consultancy language.
When this is the right answer
When the strategy has changed and the organisation hasn’t caught up with it. When culture work is happening in one place and performance management in another. When you have more than one change programme and no one holding the whole.
If what’s really needed is a stronger senior team or a more capable management layer, I’ll say so, and point you to team coaching or leadership development.
An example
A global professional body
A hundred-year-old professional body with around 1,800 people in 36 countries was setting a new strategic direction and wanted its long-standing values to mean something in practice. Over two years, working alongside the organisation’s own people team, the work ran in phases so the organisation could absorb each one: a behaviour framework built from values focus groups and agreed with the executive team; a full-day workshop run over forty times in twelve weeks by internally trained facilitators across regional hubs; a new leadership capability framework, with the existing development offer reviewed against it; a 360 for the 34 most senior leaders with individual feedback and coaching; a self-paced induction route for the customer contact centre, where nobody could spare a day; and team coaching for the executive team and the four senior teams reporting to it.
Having sat at ‘One to watch’ in the Best Companies survey for four years, the organisation reached one-star status at the end of the period. Leadership and people management became the two strongest drivers of engagement. Retention in its historically least-engaged area, the contact centre, strengthened and steadied.
Further reading
Why a signed-off strategy so often changes nothing, and how to tell which kind of gap you’ve got: When the strategy has changed and the organisation hasn’t.
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