Interim Partners works with SFL to deliver cultural change
Interim Partners (IP) has teamed up with Emma Jones of SFL, the change delivery specialist, to run a series of joint events this autumn, which we hope will be of interest to our clients. Places will be limited so please contact us early to register your interest and to ensure you receive an invitation.
Commenting on these planned events, Doug Baird, Managing Director of IP said: "SFL is a management consultancy specialising in organisational transformation. Its services focus on businesses that may have a new leadership team, undergone merger, an acquisition, a structural re-organisation or may simply be underperforming. We were introduced to each other through our non-executive director who sits on both our boards. As our client bases are different it made sense to bring them together to share with them our thinking on both consultancy and interim management solutions. We have first hand experience of working with SFL as they recently delivered a culture and values session to the staff at IP. Their session was thought provoking and will have lasting results in our business."
SFL offers six services that deliver significant results to any organisation that is facing a genuine need to change. Each of the six services enables the CEO and HR Director of an organisation to successfully execute an all-embracing change agenda:
- Leadership Assessment - Provides an objective and transparent evaluation of the leadership capability and cultural readiness for change within an organisation.
- Strategic Direction Setting - Defines the core purpose, vision and behaviours that are required to transform the culture of an organisation.
- Transformational Development - Transforms leadership to deliver outstanding results.
- Talent Development - Identifies, develops and retains the high performing players within an organisation who will enable and sustain growth and success.
- Performance Management - Embeds a culture that is universally admired through the delivery of high business performance, KPI achievement, feedback and consequences.
- Customer Experience - Translates the desired culture to the end user in a meaningful and results driven way, ensuring that both internal and external customers receive exceptional service.
SFL's Chief Executive, Emma Jones added: "SFL prides itself on its commercial prowess and over the next 12 months our goal is to drive private sector firms out of recession and help public sector organisations prepare for the inevitable financial constraints they will face going forward. We are looking forward to working with ambitious CEOs who wish to make a significant difference and stand out within their peer group. Our approach entails recruiting, delivering and serving our clients with 'PACE'. Our professional, authentic, consultative and energetic service will form the bedrock of our offering - to improve organisations operationally, commercially and behaviourally."
Case Study
Client: City West Housing Trust
Having taken over the ownership and management of 14,600 properties from Salford City Council, City West recognised the need to implement a Cultural Change Programme throughout its organisation - ensuring strategic goals could be achieved.
It engaged Cheshire-based change management consultancy SFL, to bring structure, pace and effectiveness to the change process. However, before embarking on the programme, SFL recommended that City West undertake an online Change Readiness Assessment (CRA) across its workforce before significant sums of money were invested. This would enable a clearer understanding of how ready the organisation was for change and provide quantifiable evidence on where the change efforts needed to be focused.
City West Housing Trust Chief Executive, Tim Doyle said: "The Change Readiness Assessment has provided City West with robust evidence on the views and attitudes towards change throughout the organisation. For a CEO, this information is essential to enable the organisation to drive an efficient transformation agenda and challenge financial investment in specific areas of the business."
The CRA product is a cost-effective change diagnostic tool which SFL has developed over several years. It is founded on an exclusive collaboration with Professor Peter Weinreich, the leading figure in cross-cultural identity. His work has shown that changes to attitudes and behaviour are essential to the success of any business transformation. The new software was born out of the need to streamline and add theoretical substance and technical sophistication to SFL's existing paper-based assessment, which it originally developed while working for the Lloyds Banking Group. Although this was strategically robust and produced extremely pertinent results, it was logistically complex when compared to the online simplicity of the new CRA tool.
The CRA is for group analysis but uses data captured from individual assessments. Using the Identity Structure Analysis (ISA) system developed by Professor Weinreich, it can identify the most deep-rooted and fundamental issues alive in an organisation - both at individual and group level. By collating the results of anonymous assessments, where respondents are asked to give views to questions on a bi-polar scale, the CRA charts the aspects of Leadership, Engagement, Direction, Measurement and Change Orientation through a sophisticated analysis technique using mathematical algorithms.
Most significantly it provided City West with an insightful report at group and departmental level into the propensity to change, the values and beliefs regarding change, the employees' perceptions of the organisation's leaders and the extent to which employees are engaged with the past, present and future.
The use of CRA has delivered widespread commercial and business advantages. SFL was able to recommend bespoke interventions to support City West's Cultural Change Programme and demonstrate the logic behind it with statistical evidence. It has enabled the development of a cost effective and focused change plan that addresses the real organisational objectives and established the key return on investment criteria - eliminating wasted effort and resource from the outset.
The critical action required for leadership development could be clearly defined once this true assessment of the perception of leadership throughout the organisation had been actioned. By assessing the understanding of the strategic direction and how this is delivered on a day-to-day basis, City West gained an understanding of the willingness to change throughout the organisation. This allowed them, in conjunction with SFL, to implement a targeted programme of activity identifying and utilising the change agents within the business and to develop strategies which addressed the areas of the business which were resistant to change.
That helped create a robust engagement plan to ensure that the change was received in a positive manner and implemented successfully, thereby reducing the risk of impact to customers and the business. From this informed starting point, the ultimate objectives of the cultural change programme were refined: To deliver lasting transformational culture change; to develop a behavioural framework which links to City West's values and to deliver a step change in attitude towards the customer. This programme is now being successfully implemented.
For further information on SFL's CRA tool, visit the website: www.changereadiness.co.uk
