Industry Intelligence
Research and applications for culture changers.
Read chapter 1 of Ed Muzio's award-winning guide to Iterative Management®, the only managerial culture proven over seven decades to learn and adapt fast enough to keep up in today's world. Endorsed by Jim Kouzes, Ken Blanchard, Marshall Goldsmith, and dozens of executives and managers in and out of HR, Iterate defines what management really is and helps readers create a fast, flexible, focused management team that does it well.
This client's leadership was actively discussing how best to mitigate execution risk through a complex growth inflection point. Group Harmonics conducted an execution risk assessment focused on management approaches and practices, and recommended risk mitigation actions to keep the company efficient, flexible, and on track for a variety of interrelated goals. This case study details our analysis and recommendations, and explains how the client used them to drive their business forward.
This executive team recognized that the rapid growth and imminent commercialization of new technology was causing critical challenges in the areas of communication and collaboration. Group Harmonics was engaged to provide a light, scalable, consistent management culture emphasizing agility and engagement. This case study details our 10 stage intervention, beginning with an executive decision by the client to more actively steer the culture, and ending with the entire management team adopting new behaviors and language.
This Fortune 50 technical marketing organization had recently restructured as a matrix of complex cross functional work and conflicting priorities. Leadership recognized that to succeed, management would need to improve at tolerating ambiguity, driving change across multiple stakeholders, making quick, accurate priority tradeoffs, and balancing individual decision-making with group work in pursuit of heavily interrelated goals. Our flagship simulation allowed them to create significant behavioral and cultural change after just one gathering.
Our client, roughly half of a global Fortune 500 technology manufacturer, struggled with turn times and productivity rates serving complex customer needs. Internal analysis suggested that if management could improve at defining results clearly, forecasting output consistently , and raising issues sooner and more transparently when forecasts didn't match goals or requirements, performance would improve. However, small margins created tight budgets. Our solution, a train-the-trainer that turned a team of internal OD practitioners into trainers, coaches, and change advocates, created improvement significant enough to be noticed by, and to have an impact on, C-level staff and the other half of the company.
Having a practical and precise definition of culture is a critical first step in changing it. This whitepaper provides a framework for change that liberates executives, managers, adn practitioners at every level to stop seeing culture as external and nebulous and start treating it as concrete and influencable. It also makes clear the responsibility they carry for doing so, and provides a simple set of criteria to help them get started immediately.
A variety of "typical" organizational issues seem on their face to be individual problems to be solved, but in reality stem from the same underlying issues in what might be called the organization's operating system, norms, or management culture. This whitepaper describes those links and illustrates improvement approaches with various urgency, cost, and failure risk profiles, all of which can improve financial and logistical performance more substantively and permanently than the symptom-level, superficial solutions often employed.
The myth of the all-powerful individual performer compels, but leaders’ results aren’t purely a function of personal attributes. When larger systemic forces come into play, coaches and clients face the temptation to either double down on the idea that one-on-one intervention can solve anything, or to fall back to powerlessness at the hands of organizational culture. This whitepaper explores a middle path: by understanding the client’s “role set,” coaches and other practitioners can support individual behavior change within the context of company-wide cultural patterns without becoming overwhelmed by or beholden to them.
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