Client need
The organisation is about 30 years old and has grown to about 2,000 employees, with about 10% of its workforce in Asia. In this context of fast growth, the regional management team and COOs are required to communicate and work with each other intra-Asia and between business units. With the majority of the managers coming from very diverse cultural background, the lack of understanding of the Asian culture and the individuals’ social style make the team workings and processes more difficult and challenging.
With 80% of the management team less than 5 years in the company, there is opportunity for the management team to re-establish and re-calibrate their norms and begin the process of transforming the management team culture to a higher performing level
Solution
A 1.5 day long practical workshop was co-designed and co-facilitated with the regional CEO and sponsor of the initiative. Through a series of conversations and activities, the management team agreed to implement a set of higher performing norms that will encourage team members to practise and exercise more desired attitudes and behaviours. These include freely challenging each other’s ideas, questioning assumptions and providing alternative inputs while equally important, maintaining a friendly and fun team spirit and atmosphere, follow-up, be clear, hear all voices, give and accept feedback, commit to decisions.
Impact
The regional management team members have been using the 6 norms during meetings & discussions and these have helped to make explicit the desired behaviours and expectations of and from each regional management team member.The conversations also increased the management team’s understanding of cultural differences, learning practical tips of cultures and customs of the Asian countries, focusing on frequently-faced situations at work.
Participant’s feedback suggests that they see improvement in speaking up in meetings as well as listening to different ideas and opinions of colleagues. They also enjoyed the fact that the conversation and activity were set in their personal as well as the organisation’s context, as opposed to using case studies from other organisations
The next stage is to deepen and extend the 6 norms to become part of the organisation culture.
