How well do you really understand your organisation’s culture?

When asked about formative experiences, Adrian Walcott CCMI, managing director of Brands with Values, recalls a stint at a top international bank. He was tasked with figuring out how to connect 20,000 employees to the organisation’s brand. The idea was to improve the quality of the bank’s service by aligning all employees behind the same messages in their communication with customers.

For Adrian, who’s a CMI Chartered Companion, it was an instructive experience.  

“A brilliant piece of brand advertising can in fact set your company up for failure if you're promising something that’s not being delivered,” he says. “It became apparent that, whenever we took a new direction, we’d just sheep-dip people in the new brand and expect them to operate. ​​I just thought: if we want people to lean in and drive greater discretionary effort, we need more meaningful ways to engage them.”

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Having seen the folly of brands trying to build an external image without first understanding themselves, Adrian set about co-developing the Culture Decoder, a platform designed to help organisations diagnose their own culture.  

He realised that if these organisations could unlock their inherent humanity and tie that to their strategy, it would benefit their teams and, by extension, the companies’ performance. 

Richer, smarter data

“We saw the opportunity to make culture more actionable,” says Adrian. “If boards could truly understand their company culture, they could harness it to drive greater productivity and manage challenges, whether around Consumer Duty (FCA required), AI, ESG or restructuring and aligning to purpose after a merger or change in leadership.”