Building a Culture of Accountability

The Business Challenge

Our client, was a rapidly-growing engineering firm that needed to dial up professionalism and accountability, whilst retaining the qualities of dignity and respect, which made its culture unique. The company had been founded on building strong and healthy relationships with customers, and prioritising the wellbeing of its employees. As the company expanded into multiple states and hundreds of new hires joined its ranks, it quickly became clear that its People-First strengths needed to be brought into balance with stronger accountability, more effective interpersonal feedback, and increasing courage to enable more difficult and honest conversations.

Bottom Line

A 2.5 year culture program consisting of a culture assessment, a series of accountability initiatives, and a follow-up retest, resulted in significantly stronger accountability, interpersonal trust, courage to speak up, and the giving and receiving of feedback.

Outcomes in 30 Months

• Significant improvement (>5% points) across all major culture survey metrics at point of retest.
• Strongly significant improvements (>10% points) in holding people to account, being able to raise difficult issues, trust among colleagues, and communicating openly and transparently.
• Accountability now considered one of the top 3 descriptors of the company culture.
• Implementation of ‘Culture Class’ onboarding program to instill culture values in new hires.
• Leaders actively and visibly leading the transformation.
• Effective and relevant decision-making, leaders performing as role models, alignment of systems and symbols. • Individual leaders taking accountability for managing their cultures and teams.

Workstreams

Discover Deep Dive Diagnostic culture assessment via a company-wide culture survey and one-to-one interviews with leadership team members.

• ‘Mastering Accountability’ workshops with top leaders to build internal capability.
• Retest of Discover Deep Dive Diagnostic culture assessment to track comparable progress.

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