Our Services & Approach
Our work and consulting at Culture Design Lab is driven by a shared love for building great companies led by people-first intentional leaders. We’ve always thought about this work from a design perspective, there is no one- size-fits-all solution to the complex problems companies face. We are a catalyst for a wide spectrum of companies and organizational needs to drive positive change for companies with CEO and executive coaching, supporting and advancing high performance teams to guiding entire executive teams to transform company culture to optimize on growth potential.
Culture Design
Culture Design is not an academic framework but rather an operational way of thinking about organizational culture. Our understanding of designing corporate culture includes our own remix of the design thinking process to adapt it to the specific needs of your organizations. Typical engagements range from 3-12 months. We break the work into the following three phases.
Know What Matters
In phase 1, we'll tackle the process of empathizing, where we work with you, using a variety of tools to understand the needs, desires, and pain points of your workforce, customers, and other stakeholders. Then we work with you to define an intentional vision for your future organization by doing an archeological dig on the current organization, and its mission, values, and purpose, finding the gaps between what is written down and what is experienced in reality.
Do What Matters
Know what matters phase, will animate everything you learned in part one. We work with you to purposefully integrate culture into strategy execution and improve the long-term performance of the organization. And we outline ways you can begin to deploy your culture design as a beta product and improve and iterate on it as you go as well as ways for you to engage middle managers and frontline workers to solidify and reinforce your culture design.
Measure What Matters
In measure what matters, we focus on continuous improvement and sustaining your newly designed culture. We provide methods for taking stock of what data is currently being collected, and how leaders can evaluate what needs to be measured to make their culture design succeed over the long term.
Phase 1 - Know What Matters
Exercise Empathy
Empathy is critical to the “Know What Matters” phase to focus on fully understanding, on a fundamental human level, what someone else—a worker, a customer, a community—is experiencing. These experiences all contribute to company culture, so you better understand them if you want to shape that culture.
Archeological Dig: The Culture Audit
We will do the background research with you to gain an understanding of your people and the current culture by surveying the signals you detect throughout the organization. The sum of these parts—listening to your people with empathy and the background research—comprise what we call your Culture Audit, which we like to think of as an archeological dig.
Definition and Action Plan
We’ve done the audit, the archaeological dig, now we can compare your hypothesis you had about the culture and define the culture you want to create clearly and fully. There are several tools that James uses with clients (and has used throughout his career) that help bring definition to a problem, identify key areas to focus on, and tackle an action plan to build the culture. We can identify the tools that are best for your organization to create the blueprint for your intentional culture design efforts.
Execute, Iterate, and Bring Culture to Life
During this phase, you’re working with a great hypothesis of an intentional vision for your organization. It’s now time to put it to the test. We will share with you best practices, strategies and stories full of creativity, imagination and results from dozens of CEOs and companies who are all-in on long-term intentional culture shifts. We will help you connect your culture with your strategies back to purpose throughout the organization to make your culture shift sustainable. We will work with you to develop your culture design beta plan, launch, communication plan and iteration roadmap to bring your culture to life company-wide.
Ideate and Execute
Now that we are clear on what matters to your workforce, it’s time to put to work the planning tools, identify and prioritize change levers and brainstorm where and how key activities and systems related to your culture can be adjusted.
The Phased Plan and Iterative Launch
We will work with you sharing numerous best practices to connect your culture vision with your company strategies and plan.
Phase 2 -
Do What Matters
Phase 3 -Measure What Matters
Measure
It’s time to measure your culture design’s effectiveness. We will assist you to take stock of what data is currently being collected, choose what matters most to measure, and tools and ways to measure and evaluate the results over the long haul. We will share best practices on the importance of crystalizing your findings and using visualization tools to communicate throughout the organization and to your board.
Your choices will include some combination of measures related to your unique goals and company purpose (such as custom ratings and open-ended questions on specific initiatives) as well as standard culture measures that will be relevant for most companies. You will want to consider a range of statistics that help you measure within your structure, policies and process, rewards and recognition and communication across your stakeholders including employees, vendors and customers. Some of these include:
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Engagement scores such as net referrer scores, attrition and turnover rates, and ratings around belonging, wellbeing, and satisfaction
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Hiring and promotion data filtered by the metrics above as well as the rates of internal vs. external recruitment to provide insight into your talent pipeline and the development of your bench
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We can help you identify what industry benchmarks like Culture Amp, Gallup, Great Places to Work, Net Promoters, or something low tech and simple like pulse surveys to provide the best insight for the goals and programs you have in place.
CEO & Executive Coaching
We provide executive coaching services to CEOs and their teams to meet the specific needs of each client and organization. Typical engagements range from 6-12 months and are tailored for individuals and groups based on the scope and objectives. We use a series of tools including lifeline assessments, 360 feedback and assessments, best practices like start, stop and continue, and action and communication plans to build sustainable performance improvements and drive the change that matters. Ultimately our goal is to create intentional high-performance leaders.
Assessments
With over 30 years as an operating executive across multiple industries and 20 years in the board room from consumer products to retail to fintech, James brings to bear best practices, scaling companies and building high performance teams and cultures. He uses a range of tools including lifeline assessments, 360 feedback, and interviews to identify areas of coaching. His goal in coaching is to identify the best of an executive to become a force multiplier who’s capable of building high performance teams and companies.
Priority Setting and Action Planning
This step takes the assessment insights and the executives goals into account to prioritize what matters most right now. The executives typically have a 6-12 month action plan broken down into frequency that is tailored to that executive.
1:1 Ongoing Sessions
Ongoing coaching sessions are completely customized to the needs of the company and the executive. Our approach to these sessions is always people first, allowing the executive to harness their own power to be a great leader and unlock their full potential and therefore the potential of their teams and organization.
High-Performance Team Building
High performance teams have intentional leadership, build deep trust, create constant feedback mechanisms, and have clarity of purpose, priority and focus. Our goal is to move teams from strong individual leaders to a highly functional working group that can do more, better, faster than just their individuals areas. Our team process integrates what the team is prioritizing and how they work together. An African proverb and frequent quote, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” is a mantra for our team building. We want to fully leverage the greatest potential of the team and help them place a premium on combined executional excellence.
Assessments
We utilize a wide range of tools including 360 feedback, start, stop and continue process, and 1:1 executive discussions to identify and assess the gaps and opportunities for change and improvement in building a high performance team.
Workshop Sessions
Action Plans & Measurement
We work with each organization to create custom workshop sessions to achieve specific goals. Most workshops include exercises in building trust and integration across the teams, and building empathy and learning across the team using lifeline and peer coaching in these 1-2 day sessions. Action learning is a tool we use both in the workshops and a follow on to have teams work on the most critical and impactful areas identified and prioritized to strengthen the team in terms of education, engagement and communication and execution.
Action plans and working groups to execute on the plans are a deliverable from the workshops. We expose the team to an array of best practices around planning and measurement with tools like we’ve described in our Culture Design section.