CultureWorx helped this company build upon its legacy with an intentional culture.
Introduction
A retail design, production, and installation company for Fortune 500 brands, is a family-owned and operated company founded in the 1930’s. Upon a recent reacquisition, rebranding, and reorganization effort, the company’s leadership team aimed to strengthen its company culture from the top down. They wanted a system to implement and scale their desired culture and provide everyone with a construct for connecting to its purpose and future-state goals.
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What they wanted to achieve:
- Strengthen team dynamics and align everyone to the mission and vision
- Overcome internal barriers to building a desirable workplace culture
- Navigate the natural complexities of running a family-owned business
- Leverage tools and strategies for managing a multigenerational workforce
- Implement a framework to support company growth and team transitions
- Support strategy and initiatives to advance DEI and ESG in the business
Situation
After being sold, the company’s founding family felt an innate sense of loyalty that led to the reacquisition of the business. This renewed commitment empowered leadership to take a hard look at the company’s culture and address long-standing toxicities that existed in the workplace and between team members.
Coming from a place of purpose and intentionality, the company recognized that to continue building on its legacy of creativity, collaboration, and innovation, it would need to be proactive with issues that were holding the business back.
This was the impetus for their engagement with CultureWorx.
“Our business intentionally established a partnership with CultureWorx, Dr. Donte Vaughn, and Rachel Abraham. We are driven to engage in relationships with customers or vendors with the belief that ‘you put in what you get out’.”
In partnering with CultureWorx, the company received an “educated, experienced, organized, and thoughtful approach—focused on real-life!”
Solution
CultureWorx deployed our most comprehensive Culture Performance Management™ (CPM™) solution, known as The Culture Transformation Package™, to strengthen the company’s culture and provide a system for implementing and scaling their desired culture throughout the organization.
We traveled to five locations throughout Minnesota, taking time to view the company culture through the lens of employees, leaders, and customers—everything from the company’s brand aesthetics and service quality to its leadership team’s behaviors.
We worked with more than 50 mid-to-senior-level leaders to optimize how they worked individually and together to make decisions for the business.
“Our business intentionally established a partnership with CultureWorx, Dr. Donte Vaughn, and Rachel Abraham. We are driven to engage in relationships with customers or vendors with the belief that ‘you put in what you get out’.”
Together, we worked to:
- Clearly define and articulate their core values in a practical manner
- Establish behavioral standards for how leaders should act and make decisions
- Clarify roles and responsibilities of leaders to drive ownership and accountability
- Transfer legacy knowledge to maintain their rich history of success
- Develop and sustain healthy channels of communication, issue detection, and resolution
- Organize, mobilize, and develop actions to advance DEI and ESG in the business
Outcomes
The company and CultureWorx successfully achieved what they set out to accomplish, including:
Aligning ownership and leadership
The company has a clear direction at the leadership level, more effective communication between team members, and a “Lead by Example” framework.
Establishing purpose, vision, and mission
The company defined its purpose, vision, mission, and core values with correlating leadership behaviors and expectations; these included Family, Innovation, Empowerment, and Collaboration.
“Our business intentionally established a partnership with CultureWorx, Dr. Donte Vaughn, and Rachel Abraham. We are driven to engage in relationships with customers or vendors with the belief that ‘you put in what you get out’.”
Formalizing a culture committee to drive sustainability
The company effectively mobilized its existing leaders, under the direction of a new Chief Culture Officer, empowering them to be change agents in the company and lead successful, strategic, and impactful performance management initiatives.
Attracting and developing “right-fit” team members
The company developed and enhanced job descriptions, hiring protocols, and knowledge transfer initiatives aligned to the company culture, and enabled individual leaders to have greater impact in driving performance with one-on-one executive coaching.
Advancing DEI and ESG throughout the business
The company developed a scholarship program to foster accessibility and inclusion within the community, participated in unconscious bias training for all leaders, and advanced its supplier diversification efforts while refining the organization’s focus on environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and governance management.
To generate awareness and momentum around this culture transformation, CultureWorx worked with the company to execute a leadership rally featuring guest speakers and formalized culture communications. This catalytic event served as the official marker of the company’s renewed culture!
“CultureWorx’ ability to break down the existing culture at that time and identify what and why things weren’t working was impressive. The system they had us work on and implement remains today, and we’re all appreciative to the entire CultureWorx team! I would recommend CultureWorx to any organization looking to be the best it can be.”
