Creating a Winning Culture to Deliver a New Business Strategy

A $5billion multi-national division of AkzoNobel, one of the world’s leading paints and chemicals companies, identified the need for a new strategic direction. The next step was to develop a working culture within the division that would deliver the new objectives and targets.

Recommended Approach

It is vital to any successful enterprise that strategy and company culture are aligned. A change in strategy requires a review of existing values and behaviours – are they still appropriate, do you need something more or different? Once any new values are agreed they can be used to shape the behaviours needed to deliver the new strategy.

A culture cannot be decreed from above or enforced; it needs to be owned by everyone in the organisation.

GNIUS proposed a series of participative events and workshops that would involve the whole team in creating and implementing their new culture.

Bringing Together the Leadership Team

The culture development process began by inviting the senior management team from across the business to Texas, USA, for 3 challenging and inspiring days. The aim was to start the process of identifying and defining the type of organisation they wanted to become.

The conference agenda was designed with ‘participation not presentation’ from the start and incorporated an Appreciative Inquiry approach, including World Café Sessions and ‘real time’ Graphic Recording, to identify and build on the team’s strengths in developing the new culture.

The program included –

Storytelling sessions – in which the senior management shared their ‘leadership stories’ and the whole team discussed the power of stories in building a more collaborative, open culture.

Creative Workshops – to explore the current values and behaviours and what needed to change to deliver the new strategy.

  • What do we want the future to look like?
  • How are we going to get there?
  • How do we get the rest of the division involved?

Team Building Exercises – on the set of a real Wild West movie set! Activities were designed to help everyone learn to relax under pressure, show how hard something is to do even when it looks easy, focus on the positives and learn to compete as champions and believe in the value of your work and thinking “we” versus “me”.

Involving the Whole Team in Creating the Culture

To help senior managers engage with their teams and involve everyone in the culture development process, a series of local workshops were developed – gathering stories, ideas and experiences before the event and sharing outcomes, progress and action plans afterwards

To signal the importance of the new strategy and culture a visual identity and tagline were developed for all related communications – ‘Winning Together to Grow’.

The whole story was brought together in a narrative book which combined the organisations new vision, strategy, values and behaviours with an inspiring call to action from the CEO, encouraging everyone to get involved and play their part in delivering success.

Cultures aren’t created overnight; they must be encouraged and supported.  To maintain the process of culture development an on-going program of communications was created involving regular intranet and email updates, local manager briefings and the introduction of a new rewards and recognition program.

To discuss how GNIUS can create unique and engaging programmes to inspire culture change in your organisation contact Michael on 0330 088 0506