What is culture?

 

Organisational culture is the unique blend of values and behaviours that shape the way that its employees habitually work together. The way in which leaders lead is key to shaping the culture. Cultures are unique to organisations and high-performance cultures are intentionally “shaped” to align with purpose and strategy to sustain successful organisations.

 

Culture is misunderstood and often a hidden opportunity

 

We believe every organisation has a culture and values that under pin “how they work” but this is not always aligned with purpose and strategy, particularly in times of major external and/or directional change. Attempts to define, drive and control this alignment process rarely succeed.

 

Our success is based on helping you shape your culture and discover your values, building on “what you have” to bridge the gap to “what you need”. Creating the ability to inform strategic choices and decisions and implementing change in a way that shapes and reinforces a consistent, sustainable and aligned culture. A winning culture in which people know what it means to live the values and whose potential is released to engage with and own their role in delivering successful change with a strong sense of purpose.

 

The power of an aligned culture

 

A purposefully developed and aligned culture will actively support the accelerated delivery of your strategy. When culture is ignored, misunderstood or hard to define it can slow down the implementation of strategy and the delivery of change. Intentionally shaped and nurtured your culture can be a powerful force for change. Often strategies and leaders are changed at great cost, with limited return, when the root cause is a failure to understand and align your culture.

 

How we help leaders discover their values and shape their culture

 

Taylor Clarke consultants work with senior teams to assess the current culture in the organisation, identify the culture they need and help them discover and embed the values, leadership, processes, practices and habits to shape their culture and enable their strategy over time.

 

Our culture and values interventions are bespoke, developed in collaboration with clients to take account of each organisation’s unique situation, beliefs, capability and aspirations.

 

An external perspective, a proven bespoke process with supporting tools and facilitating a co-created plan informed by share expertise are the key things we bring to work in partnership with leaders and teams in a meaningful, connected and practical way to co-create and facilitate plans for transforming culture.

 

Our Guiding framework for shaping culture and values

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For the last 30 years Taylor Clarke have been working with leaders, their teams and organisations to help them fulfil their potential. Culture has always been a key part of the context for our work, and while not always the main focus of our support, culture has always been impacted by our work.

In the last 10 years culture has moved to centre stage as our work has become more strategic and transformational, while the recent pandemic on top of Brexit, climate change and digitisation has enhanced the need to consider culture and strategy together.

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• Do we have the culture we need or are we living with the culture we have?

• Can we transform without a concerted effort to align culture?

• How do we become more intentional, rigorous and focused on shaping our culture and values to fit with our emergent strategy and long term vision?

• How aligned are our Purpose, Vision, Strategy, Values and culture and how do we bridge the gap with our leadership and strategic choices?
   

A bespoke approach to co-creating culture change plans

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We have been evolving our culture development framework and tool kit to help us work collaboratively with clients. We help client organisations navigate their way through a process which helps identify the culture they have and be more intentional around how they shape the culture they need to achieve their strategic goals in a more informed, measured and structured approach

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• Every project is different, culture has many moving parts and influences so the start points, journey and solutions vary with the context and goals

• Our approach helps bring more focus, measurement, structure and ownership to the development of the diagnosis, plan, choices, ownership and engagement around a process we believe is shaped from the top and built from the bottom.

• We wear several hats…..Coach, Consultant, Facilitator, Critical Adviser in supporting a co-creation process that is fundamentally collaborative

 

This high level 3 phase Framework and Road Map is flexibly applied to build on your start point and goals to help shape a plan to engage with your leadership team and identify the opportunities, challenges and solutions to aligning culture and strategy working with your leaders, values, operating model and change teams.