Organisational effectiveness
Helping make your business fit for purpose
Our Organisational Effectiveness practice works with different levels of your business to make sure people have the right capabilities, and are supported by the right culture and organisational design, so that the strategy can be delivered.
With the senior team working and the strategy clear, this is the point other consultancies may well be leaving the building. But because we believe that the whole system of your business – people and structure - must work together if your firm is to be as successful as it can be, SystemShift is there to help you close whatever gaps the strategy process may have identified.
So whether we’ve worked with you on your strategy or not, our first task if we’re to help you make your business fit for purpose is to assess what gaps remain in the organisation that might hinder the strategy’s execution. There are four types of gap that can pose a risk to the execution of a strategy or change – gaps in clarity, in structure, in capability or in culture. Through our discovery process, we find the gaps that are costing you the most; we then design and deliver interventions to fill them.
Clarity gaps
This is where people don’t yet have a sufficiently clear or shared understanding of the strategy. If we’ve worked with you on your strategy, this ought not to be an issue; but if not, then we may have more work to do to clarify the strategy and align the business around it. Using part of our proprietary ‘Step Up, Step Back’ approach, we work with senior leaders to clarify the choices they’ve made and refine how these are being communicated - so nothing will get lost in translation.
Structural gaps
This is where people understand the strategy, but the way the organisation is set up - its roles, reporting lines, or KPIs and rewards – isn’t supporting the strategy ask.
We use our proprietary ‘Step Up, Step Back’ approach to identify and diagnose the areas of weakness or pressure. These proven diagnostics help us assess what’s missing or not yet working well enough, so you can take early action to course-correct, to better support people in delivering the strategy.
Capability gaps
Even if the strategy is clear and has the right structures to support it, people may not currently have the skills to deliver it. In which case we work with different groups and levels within the business to help them learn and practise the skills and capabilities they need. The vehicle for this is often bespoke leadership development programmes, designed for specific populations and capabilities within your business. These are designed specifically for you, based on our shared view of what you need. They are taught by our world-class faculty and supported by individual and group coaching to embed the new skills and behaviours.
Culture gaps
But even if people understand the strategy and have both the structure and the capabilities they need to deliver it, the organisation’s current culture may not be enabling or encouraging them to work in this way. This is especially true if the “official” version of the culture is materially different from how the culture is experienced by people on the ground.
We have a proven process for diagnosing your current culture and then identifying practical, concrete ways you can re-shape it – so that your culture can start supporting your strategy, rather than working against it.
Depending on our assessment of what you need, we usually follow two approaches:
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First, we use our proprietary ‘Step Up, Step Back’ approach to translate your strategy into the building blocks of execution. If we’ve worked with you on the strategy, then some of these will already be in place. If not, we may have more work to do to clarify the strategy and align the business around it. Our proven diagnostics help us assess what’s missing and also alert you to where something is getting lost in translation from the top to the bottom of your firm, so that you can take early action to course-correct.
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Second, if our assessment is that you have some cultural and/or capability gaps, perhaps in specific groups within the firm, we design and deliver bespoke leadership development programmes to help close these gaps. These not only give people the skills and capabilities they need to deliver the strategy; they also act as vehicles for re-shaping your culture so that you can develop the culture your strategy needs.
Examples of our clients
Linklaters LLP is a global, magic circle law firm headquartered in London. With over 5000 employees, and nearly 500 Partners in their 30 offices worldwide, Linklaters prides itself on being ‘best in class’. We work with them on a number of leadership programmes, including their annual programme for New Partners and a regular 4-day programme for the firm’s future leaders.
Elsbeth and her team know us incredibly well. This means they don’t just “teach” us what they think we need – though that’s important and they do that brilliantly. But they can also coach and advise us on how to put the learning into practice. That’s added real and immediate value to how we work with each other and with our clients.
Gideon Moore
Firmwide Managing Partner
Barclays plc is a global universal bank, headquartered in London and operating in personal, corporate and investment banking, as well as wealth and investment management. We worked with over one hundred of their senior leaders, designing and delivering a leadership development programme that aimed to take them and their businesses to the next level.
Elsbeth led a year-long leadership programme aimed at accelerating the growth of high potential individuals at the Director/Managing Director level. The programme provided me with an opportunity to learn more about leadership, strategy, change and innovation. The skills, tools and knowledge gained on the programme helped me improve my ability to lead others and the organisation. None of that would have been possible without Elsbeth. Her energy, intellect, passion and engaging manner were exceptional. She balanced academic knowledge with practical examples, and helped me to think through and plan complex business scenarios to deliver tangible client benefits.
Jon Doyle
Managing Director; Chief of Staff, Barclays Legal and formerly COO, Corporate Banking Product
Baringa LLP is a global management consulting firm, with 75 Partners and 700 employees. Awarded accolades by both its clients and its people – as a great company to work with, and a great place to work – Baringa has delivered enviable levels of year-on-year growth. We worked with the firm to help prepare its Partners for the next stage of growth, designing and delivering a programme that covered leadership, strategy, culture, communication and commercial acumen.
Elsbeth has been an outstanding teacher, facilitator, coach and trusted advisor to me, and the entire leadership team of 70+ partners at Baringa, for the last 18 months. I have never worked with an outsider in quite the same way – she absorbed the Baringa culture, identified our leadership development needs and established trust across the entire Partnership almost instantly. That means that the frameworks and tools we explored really fit us – both our strategy and our culture – and that means we’ve been using the language and the frameworks from the Programme back in the real world right from the start. It’s now just part of how we think and what we do. I’ve heard lots of my fellow Partners say that this was the single best leadership development programme they’ve ever been on – and the teaching and coaching is definitely world-class. But for me, the test is what difference has it made not just to individuals, but to the firm. The fact is the SystemShift programme helped us accelerate our leadership development and change our firm in exactly the way we wanted.
Adrian Bettridge
Managing Partner
