Culture Consulting

There are two core components: a senior-team retreat to prioritize the problems to be solved, and then monthly consulting sprints where I work with your people to resolve the last-mile culture breakdowns at an operational level. Here are some examples:

• Facilitating a meeting with the marketing team and the education team to get clear on decision-making roles related to an upcoming email campaign.
• Working with teams to help them use the new Slack channel for reporting progress on AI experiments.
• Helping managers adopt the lightweight weekly check-in everyone agreed to, when performance conversations still only really happen at review time.
• Getting a team to actually run one small experiment end-to-end without escalating for permission, because you’ve said you want people to “move faster and try things,” but they still wait to be told it’s okay.
• Facilitating a conflict between two managers who have different interpretations about how to cascade senior decisions down to each of their teams, because the teams themselves struggle to coordinate when they have different levels of information.
• Offer a lunch and learn session on managing conflict with confidence for all staff.

Full-service culture management has someone watching the whole system in real time—catching the silo that’s quietly re-forming, the decision that didn’t cascade, the new hire whose onboarding didn’t take—and acting on it before it costs you a good person or a stalled quarter. You get the accountability of a full culture function without adding a full-time executive to payroll, freeing your senior leadership to focus on the massive challenges of today’s environment. Here are some examples:

• Full-day senior team retreat. Not only to prioritize the culture work, but also to directly address any behaviors at the leadership level that are not consistent with the culture.
• Internal data gathering. I’ll spend most of the first month gathering data (at minimum via conversations with teams, but optionally through a culture assessment survey)
• Quarterly culture management roadmaps. With priorities, targets, and culture change action items to be implemented

The full-service option is for organizations that know they need a permanent structure to support their culture management but cannot afford a full FTE to manage it. This option includes everything in the targeted option but adds on a layer of governance and accountability. I would not only handle the culture management work, I would serve as a fractional Chief Culture Officer overseeing continued culture design efforts and managing internal and external communications about culture, and tracking and analyzing metrics to ensure progress on culture management and improvement in organizational outcomes

The project starts with a six month workplan taking you from assessment to action plan. I’ll do workshops and direct calls with an internal culture team to take them step by step through the process. Here’s how it works:

• Culture Assessment: All employees take my WorkXO culture assessment that reveals your hidden culture patterns and dynamics, particularly across subgroups.
• Culture Priorities: I’ll create an internal culture team that will analyze the data and draft up a small list of priority areas for the culture change.
• Culture Playbook: Then we write up “plays” for each priority—action items that will move the culture in the direction of the priority.
• Prioritized Pitches: A small number of plays will be approved by the management team so you can start implementation right away.
• Implementation Support: I can also help you manage the culture change as you start doing it.

Our work with Jamie gave us insight into ourselves as an organization, what we do well, and perhaps most importantly, the themes within our culture that we believe make us unique and successful.  We now have the words that help guide us with hiring new staff, performance management, and how to work together effectively every day.  Jamie’s guidance throughout the process was invaluable to me and, ultimately, has proven invaluable to NBOA.”

Jeff Shields, CAE, FASAE, President and CEO
National Business Officers Association

I have more than a decade of experience in culture research and practice inside organizations, and more than 25 years in consulting. Before that, I was in the conflict resolution field, and one lesson spans my career: It’s up to you to design and manage your culture, not the consultant. My culture design program gives you exactly what you need to be successful in doing that, and you have the option of keeping me on as an implementation coach after the design work is done and you move into culture management.