Culture and Team Transformation

Dynamic Culture Achieves Purposeful Performance

Culture is the expression of mindsets, behaviours, and practices that are lived out everyday between the walls and behind the screens of an organization. Put simply, culture can be understood as “the way things are done around here.” It is like a tree with the inner rings shaped by the values and beliefs of founders and the outer rings added by successive influential leaders and owners over time.

Culture can take on many forms and either work for, or work against, your success. A dynamic, engaging culture is the key to aligning strategy with action. If healthy and aligned, an organizational culture can be a valuable, intangible asset that provides a winning advantage.

A high purpose, high performance culture is no longer optional. Millennial and Gen Z talent look for dynamic cultures that fit with their values and career aspirations. To be successful, organizations must actively nurture a dynamic culture in order to attract the best talent and efficiently translate workforce energy into results.

leaders discuss strategy in group
How Should Your Organization Evolve Diagram

5 Key Dimensions of Culture

Culture can be difficult to describe. It’s often best expressed in actual behaviours and practices that may (or may not) align with stated corporate values.

As an organization matures and evolves, so too must their culture. It’s not something that can be switched on, swapped out, replicated, or replaced, but it can be nurtured, supported, and strategically shaped. If organizational culture is aligned with purpose and objectives, if it engages your best talent and becomes a powerful enabler for success. If not, it becomes a barrier to success that can derail projects, sow seeds of distrust, and dismantle your strategy from the inside out.

Is your organization’s culture helping you succeed and attract and retain the best talent?

How To Strengthen Your Culture

When it comes to culture change, transformations are usually achieved through continual evolution, not revolution. At New Vantage, we customize an approach that fits your context, but often focus on key organizational zones to renew mindsets and behaviours, including:

Executive, Management and Board Culture

This is often the best place to start. Set the tone on top and ensure the most senior leaders are living the organization’s values and modelling the cultural imperatives. Misalignment, lack of clarity, lack of accountability, and under-developed trust within or between your executive teams, managers, and board will result in organizational rifts. 

Culture transformation begins with aligning teams and addressing areas of potential team and board ineffectiveness. Our experience with boards and senior executive teams will help you get clarity on the needed culture and values alignment and help drive accountability for modeling the right actions, mindsets, and behaviours.

Renew the Strategy, Renew the Culture

As an organization’s strategy evolves, so must the culture. For a business to successfully make a significant pivot, it will likely require new mindsets and ways of working. For example, a push for innovation requires leaders and teams to encourage and reward experimentation and abandon execution perfectionism. 

Whatever the business pivot, our strategic know-how will help you identify and implement the corresponding culture pivots required for success (before it becomes a problem).

Cross Functional Teaming

As businesses flatten and increase cross functional activity, cultures collide and ambiguous areas of ownership and accountability. This can create more friction than acceleration. When you’re bringing teams together, you need an engagement code that aligns stakeholders, teaches new mindsets and practices, and creates the roadmap for collaboration. 

That’s where we come in: our processes can deliver cultural harmony by deepening alignment, clarifying and articulating lines of accountability, and connecting cultures in a meaningful way.

Engagement and Conflict

Employee engagement data may signal the need for CPR on your culture. The underlying symptoms of poor or declining engagement are often interrelated areas of misalignment. While townhall updates or targeted training may help, these multifaceted issues typically require a more specific, integrated, and sustained approach. 

We have a depth of experience in diagnosing and addressing the underlying issues related to engagement, utilizing our strengths to facilitate sensitive conversations and conflict management processes.

Post-Pandemic Workplace

The pandemic has created unparalleled changes that have significantly increased workplace stress and burnout. We have experienced a collective trauma and organizations must adapt, express compassion, and be attuned to mental wellness. Everyone has a role to play in this – it can no longer be isolated as an “HR issue”. Leaders and teams need a larger suite of skills to build engagement and respond to those who are struggling, and strategies for managing these challenges while maintaining their own wellbeing.

 New Vantage has been successfully engaging organizations to enhance resiliency for over a decade and have established themselves as experts in the newly evolving world of post-pandemic leadership and culture building.

Custom Focus

We can assess whether your culture is fully aligned with your strategy and whether it will lead to high performance. If not, we have the know-how to create alignment. 

With our experience, we can create change programs that address the unique issues facing your organization. Culture expresses itself through many ways, and having the right expertise can bring added reassurance as you bring forward change. 

How We Can Help

First, we listen carefully, seeking to understand your culture, growth opportunities, and limiting factors. We skillfully separate symptoms from root causes and drivers. Second, we build confidence in the sponsors and stakeholders who engage with us throughout our process. Third, we create a path for positive change that can be sustained, reinforced, monitored, and rewarded.

Our proven methodology includes:

  • Culture survey assessments and interviews
  • 360 degree surveys
  • Facilitated workshops
  • Award winning Leadership CirclesTM methodology for sustained change
  • Culture performance measurement
  • Coaching

At New Vantage our culture transformation have resulted in demonstrable impact:

  • Double digit increases in employee engagement and trust scores
  • Culture impact led to the development of an innovation program affiliated with Harvard University
  • A client was the recipient of the Order of Excellence, a prestigious national award for organizational excellence

Contact us to learn more.

Marv Franz pointing to sticky notes on wall
“Over the course of a decade, New Vantage partnered closely with us in a journey of human-centred transformation and renewal that brought about extraordinary impact. To see employees rise to their potential, leaders stepping up to empower their teams, new innovation on a global stage and bottom-line results has been such a rewarding experience. The ripple effect of the culture we created continues to positively impact our communities and the families of our employees. This is what happens when people are seen as precious in an organization.”
Dr. Hugh Drouin
Commissioner of Social Services, Durham Region (retired)

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