Strengthening Organisational Culture

Industry - Retail. Geography - HQ Dubai. Ownership - Privately Held. Revenue - $7Bn. Employees - 60000

Challenge: To create people-oriented business leaders.

The organization had recently defined new corporate values, conducted an employee engagement survey, and institutionalised a “Happiness Day”. The intent was to ensure leadership alignment with not only the values and behaviours of the promoters, but also with the company’s roots and legacy. The intent was to, build future business skills which would catapult the business forward on all talent metrics of recruitment, integration, engagement, retention and productivity.

 

A top-down approach was adopted as most of the 25-member global leadership team (with 20-30 years of experience in some of the world’s top notch brands across continents) had been hired recently and the team was in a tough phase of coming together and integrating themselves into the new culture.

 

So key challenges were to:

1. Ensure alignment of the leadership team
2. Enable culture change and transformation
3. Engage with the workforce to improve all talent metrics

Solution: One year leadership alignment, development and engagement roadmap was designed and implemented.

 

Four key competencies were identified:

1. Leader as a Coach
2. Leader as a Transformational Leader and
3. Leader as a Social Leader and
4. Leader as a Storyteller.

Over next one year, BIY worked with them to:

• Conduct an As-is baseline.
• Quarterly focus group discussions and surveys with the stakeholders to ensure positive needle movement on the behaviours.
• A robust schedule of activities for leaders to practice new skills of coaching, storytelling, and social leader in live business setting such as client meetings, employee town halls, store visits, and business reviews.
• Multiple intervention methods were used : Webinars, external expert talks, workshops, and live sessions to build capability.

A dedicated project manager from the client side and BIY ensured seamless delivery of the interventions. The whole project was championed by the business leader and routinely pitched to the founder of the company to ensure buy-in, alignment, and sponsorship.

 

Result: After one year, the team is fully integrated with the culture of the company and strongly aligned with each other. Their language and behaviour is consistent with those of the company, as clearly visible in the engagement score and verbatim comments from the employees. Brand proposition has been consistently rising, and retention and engagement of talent has shown a dramatic upward trend. The business is getting applauded with the organisation being asked to share their roadmap and practice with others. They have also recently won a prestigious award for their Leadership Development Program.

 

 

 

Transformational Coaching

 

Industry - Pharmaceutical. Geography - India (HQ). Ownership - Public. Revenue - $3Bn. Employees - 50000

 

Challenge:

The leaders of the business have huge domain expertise, experience within the industry, and longevity with the organisation. The organisation is getting into newer streams of business and global geographies and wants to seed them with its vintage leaders. However, some of the eligible leaders were perceived not to have global leadership skills such as new age communication skills and the ability to tell stories, enthrall stakeholders, and pitch their product and services assertively viz-a-viz competition. They also lacked executive presence and gravitas and especially a strong personal brand.

 

 

Solution: Given the profile of the leaders, the team decided to do 1:1 executive coaching interventions over a 12-month period. This was complemented with skill workshop on building a personal brand, the art and science of storytelling, and honing executive presence was also given. The goal of the workshop was to effect a visible change in the demonstrable behaviours. These behaviours furthermore had to be linked with business metrics such as NPS, business acquisition, growth in business and them rising up in the ranks w.r.t leadership succession pipeline.

 

 

Result:

At the end of 8 coaching sessions and skill workshops, the team members, the business leader, and even key clients started to feel a perceptible difference in the behaviours of the leader. They started to get noticed more in large boardroom meetings and during pitch out with clients. Their chemistry backed by their new found communication skills strengthened their business relationship. The morale of their immediate teams also started to improve based on the future business opportunities the leaders started to articulate in a storytelling way, and the overall engagement on business floor also started to increase. Presently, there is a quantum shift in their own personal brand positioning both within the company and with the industry as per feedback received from the doctors and hospitals. They have started to talk with far more confidence in conferences and are able to articulate the business proposition of their company, their vertical and their teams more forcefully.

 

 

 

Inclusion and Diversity

 

Industry - Banking, Financial,Insurance. Geography - UK (HQ). Ownership - Global Bank. Employees 72000.

 

Challenge:

The bank business and HR leadership is a strong supporter and believer in Diversity and Inclusion as one of the key drivers of business success. The leadership team is global and exposed to multiple concepts of leadership and organisation development interventions. However they were unhappy with the % of women in their leadership team and especially concerned with what they thought was a lack of career focus coupled with low self-belief in their mid to senior level women leaders.

 

 

Solution:

A program was designed to build capability at 3 levels for their women leaders –

• Know yourself,
• Build yourself, and
• Believe In Yourself.

Interventions were designed to help the cohorts understand themselves at a deeper leve,l and basis the findings, capability workshops were put in place. The workshops were followed by 1:1 coaching for each of the women participants as often there are things unique to each participant, which need to be heard and resolved for the women to take a quantum leap forward.

 

 

Result:

Six months post the program,

• 20% of the women have been promoted to the next level with group companies.
• 30% of them have been given expanded roles, international projects and opportunity to work with CXO’s.
• 40% of them claim that these new skills were crucial in their success per internal survey.
• 70% of the cohorts are an ambassador of the organisation's brand & reputation as observed by their social media activity.
• Their engagement scores and discretionary effort has gone up by nearly 20% per productivity measurement tool.
• The bank recently won a global award for their focus, practices and programs in the space of D&I.