Case study : Caterpillar
Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB), one of the UK’s leading mortgage advice brands, wanted to future-proof its culture while undergoing a major transformation project. With 200 businesses and 1,500 advisers, they needed a cultural framework to connect strategy, people, and performance.
more likely to recommend MAB as a place to work
improvement to communication (internal NPS)
of employees feel they fully understand the Mission, Vision and DNA
at the Business Culture Leadership Award
The Chief Marketing Officer of a newly formed Global After-Sales Division of Fortune 100 Company Caterpillar (already widely acknowledged for their engaging, progressive culture) identified the need for their divisional culture to be re-shaped and refined in order to facilitate successful delivery of its strategic plan.
The desired outcome was to engage the leaders of the division to understand, agree and articulate the future culture they needed for their next stage of growth.
Not only did the culture need to meet with the spirit of Caterpillar’s overall global organisation, and support a newly launched Diversity and Inclusion initiative; it also had to draw together employees from five continents, and create a shared definition of the culture that will define their people’s behaviour, attitudes and outcomes.
The Chief Marketing Officer was conscious that successful delivery of the new culture needed to start with obtaining the full buy-in and engagement of the 60 leaders of the division.
To coincide with their global leadership summit in Chamonix, they asked Culture Consultancy to design and deliver a one-day workshop to shape the new divisional cultural tenets.
The key was to fuel positive discussion and debate whilst ensuring good levels of engagement and ownership for the outputs of the day, inspiring and engaging people to work together to develop and deliver a culture for success.
Delivered through our award-winning 3-stage methodology:
We were aware that having just one day with 60 leaders was not much time to set the tenets and engage the leaders, so we conducted the ‘lite’ version our CC culture assessment to understand as much about their current culture and future desired state as possible.
We designed a pre-event survey comprising of a mixture of both textual and visual questions in order to inspire a set of key engaging responses and to provide critical insight into the degree of readiness and attitudinal clues around the culture.
Whilst providing insight the questions were also designed to stimulate thinking around the future culture required and a potential cultural change journey, all in preparation for an intensive Cultural Immersion event.
We designed and delivered a workshop to shape the new divisional cultural tenets and gain full buy-in and engagement for the new culture, including:
The workshop was designed to be “away from the norm” and a little “edgy” in order to tap into a more creative element within attendees and to encourage them to move away from the existing ‘way we do things’. As such, the leadership teams engaged in a variety of experiential activities, carefully designed to provoke leaders to explore both personal and organisational approaches to their leadership going forward. The experiential activities looked at 3 core aspects:
The level of creativity and passion unleashed as part of the workshop was inspirational, powerful and contagious. The whole room felt different, as did the leaders themselves.
Harnessing this new level of energy and creativity we worked with the leaders to define and anchor the pillars of their new culture.
Having achieved the event objectives, we then provided post event support to a core group of leaders using our CulturEmbed Team Based Embedding (TBE) methodology, guiding them to design the follow up, engagement and embedding activities which the leaders could use to start embedding the new culture into their teams.
The Executive Team were delighted to be coming away with a set of clearly defined Cultural Tenets and with the contribution and commitment levels of their Extended Leadership Team; and in particular how energised and enthused the team were to start implementing the new divisional culture. The sense of purposefulness was palpable; with Leaders going away with a clear sense of direction, action plan and personal pledge to the Division.
Much credit to the facilitators. No standard brainstorming, deep analytics of a survey, weeks of team meetings to address a topic … instead we dug deep, used skills and tools not often applied to our daily jobs and came up with meaningful culture commitments and goals. Awesome exercise with an extremely actionable outcome.
Caterpillar Leadership Team
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