spotlight

We at Senn Delaney wish you a healthy and high-performance 2012. To help you, your team and your organization thrive this year, we are pleased to share the best of our thought leadership and interviews. These articles and videos are intended to deepen leaders' understanding that organizational cultures can be intentionally shaped, and that high-performance, thriving cultures create the greatest competitive advantage and achieve outstanding results. Warmest wishes for 2012!

We are pleased to share four of the year's best CEO interviews on culture featuring ING Direct CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, Ogilvy & Mather Chairman Shelly Lazarus, and The Home Depot Founder Bernie Marcus.

Griffin Hospital is considered a leader in innovative healthcare, but that wasn't always the case. Today, CEO Pat Charmel shares the story behind the turnaround that led to Griffin being named one of Fortune Magazine's top places in America to work. It all started with innovative thinking, a true focus on the customer and overcoming resistance to conventional thinking and change.

YUM! Brands CEO and Chairman David Novak offers powerful and sincere directives for creating a cohesive, success-oriented corporate culture in his new book, TAKING PEOPLE WITH YOU: The Only Way to Make BIG Things Happen. Several of Senn Delaney's culture-shaping principles are noted in the book. We are pleased to share an excerpt.

James L. Heskett's new book, The Culture Cycle: How to shape the unseen force that transforms performance, demonstrates that developing an effective culture can account for up to half of the difference in operating income between two organizations in the same business. Senn Delaney is pleased to share an exclusive chapter excerpt, Measuring Effectiveness.

measurement

measurement creates accountability

We measure successful culture shaping at individual, team and organizational levels


That which gets measured, gets paid attention to. We have proven, results-based, culture-shaping metrics that demonstrate how cultures can be systematically shaped to improve performance. Shaping a culture is a process, not an event, and change must be measured against baseline to provide a clear picture of progress and improved results.

Successfully shaping a culture occurs at three levels: individual, team and organization. Effective measurement must show change at all three levels. Our proven metric instruments focus on all three levels throughout your culture-shaping process and determine which elements are shifting to enhance results. We believe measurement creates accountability for the culture-shaping success. We have successfully measured our clients' cultural shifts and their impact on such key initiatives as safety, customer service and loyalty, and quality.

Clients consistently report several benefits

To date, we have measured thousands of leaders and participants in industries worldwide, focusing on how internalizing our thriving cultural dimensions impacts their performance. Key findings of our Culture Impact Survey™ show that our process makes a positive difference at every organizational level, including senior leadership through front-line associates. Improved productivity, employee satisfaction, communication, coaching, collaboration and recognition are all results of our culture-shaping process.

We have received thousands of success stories from leaders and participants. The vast majority of our client participants:
  • Believe that our culture-shaping process enhances organizational effectiveness and creates better results for the business
  • Report that participating in the culture-shaping process has a positive impact on their effectiveness on the job
  • Believe their organizations are now moving in the correct and aligned direction
Leaders of organizations who have experienced our process consistently report several benefits for their companies, including:

  • A healthy, high-performing culture with better execution and decision-making
  • A more aligned, mutually supportive and effective executive team
  • An executive team that is well-grounded in how to create a healthy, high-performance culture throughout the organization
  • A more nimble, innovative and engaged workforce
  • Improved morale and performance resulting from a culture of recognition, coaching and feedback
  • Increased levels of teamwork and collaboration to support cross-organizational strategies and initiatives
  • Greater levels of accountability at all leadership and management levels
  • Stronger cross-organizational collaboration to create greater value across the enterprise

This valuable feedback has contributed to the refinement and growth of our process and methodology to measurably improve our clients' experiences.