Culture Change in Tokyo
Challenge
Mary Murray’s diverse IT team in Japan had begun to lose sight of its goals. Part of a major international investment bank in Japan, the team had to be very client-focused to stay on top of its game and ahead of competitors. However, the Tokyo-based division was facing some big challenges: moving into a business growth and investment phase; finding a way to ensure communication among its 300 staff; and addressing overall low self-awareness levels in the group. “I’d found that staff had become very inwardly focused on the day-to-day work that needed to be done rather than on our clients’ needs,” Murray says. “We realised that to become more strategic and outwardly focused the organisation needed to undergo a major change in culture.” As the department’s head, Murray decided action should be taken to improve the team’s performance and self-knowledge. She called in the professional help of Cathy Bernatt, President of Creating…, a firm that specializes in leadership training, conflict facilitation and organizational development.
Approach
Identifying that the team came from diverse backgrounds and shared more than 20 nationalities between them, Murray and Bernatt initially set about changing the culture and strategies from within. They decided the best way to change the culture and help the team become more strategic and outward-focused, would be to run an IT division ‘offsite’ – a team session outside their office environment – to focus on improving their personal and professional relationships as well as exploring ways to enhance client service. Murray and Bernatt determined that the Team Management Profile (TMP) would provide a common language and path to deeper understanding for staff and their co-workers. “We felt that the TMP could act as a catalyst for staff to begin to develop strategies to leverage their strengths, and to provide a common language and a path to deeper understanding and connection,” Murray says. Administering a TMP for a division of almost 300 people presented some interesting logistical challenges for Bernatt, as did holding the interest of the 184 attendees present at the offsite training day. By allowing participants to access their personal TMP reports prior to the offsite, Bernatt was able to stimulate and prepare her large audience, which created quite a buzz of interaction and sharing of TMP results in the office. She then delivered a distribution analysis of team results to the team and sub-teams. On the morning of the offsite training, the senior management team – including the managing director, business line leaders and global management – presented their key messages, by video from overseas offices. The rationale was to address any gap in perceptions between the senior management team and employees, and to discuss the global goals of the organization so each team member understood how their daily activities contributed to the overall division and organisational strategy.
Outcome
Since administering the TMP training session, Murray says her former organization’s culture began to change for the positive as a result of the offsite and the TMP. “The offsite was instrumental in starting the change process. Over time we started to create a shared culture of accountability and to create an environment and culture you want to live within.” A significant outcome of the programme was the generation of over 190 improvement suggestions. “Achieving this outcome means the bank is better placed to direct resources to where it is needed and will help them move forward to the next stage of the development process,” says Murray. The team’s TMP distribution analysis revealed that the Advising function was the least represented, prompting staff to recognise where resources were being wasted and to stop and ask more questions before jumping in with minimal client information.