Case

After hiring new employees for leadership positions, the company typically lost these people within 6 months. This was a very serious matter, as hiring and onboarding people was a high investment in terms of money and time. After our initial discussion with key members of the leadership team, we felt that they did not have a shared view of who they were and where they were going: they had built up the organization from scratch, but never spent time on formulating a vision and purpose, nor developing a shared leadership approach. Our assessment was that during the hiring process they were ‘selling’ the company in way that did not match with what people found once they were on board. Hence, they left.

We performed a culture analysis with the leadership team. In a one-day workshop, we split the team into two groups and performed an in-depth culture analysis with both groups in parallel. The guided approach led to a surprising result: both groups had described their culture and leadership in almost identical terms.

We were ready to apologize for our incorrect assessment. The team however, reassured us: before the exercise they were not aware, that they shared the same view. It was the first time they had described their culture and leadership approach explicitly and clearly.

By consciously understanding that they were in agreement about their identity, and by creating a common language to communicate it to existing employees and new hires, they managed to strengthen their organization and to stop the unwelcome cycle of hiring and losing new employees.