CHALLENGE & OPPORTUNITY

Against the backdrop of a highly competitive superannuation industry characterised by ongoing consolidation and cost pressure, this superannuation fund was focused on becoming ‘future ready’ and  being prepared for significant change.

With operating conditions expected to become more challenging and potentially constrain the organisation’s future goals, this superannuation fund had commenced a number of change-readying activities including a review of its operating model and technology platforms. To support and reinforce these activities, the organisation sought a visible and impactful people intervention to kick start necessary conversations regarding its aspired culture. Specifically, this organisation sought to engage employees in resetting expectations around the organisation’s values and to involve senior leaders in identifying the leadership behaviours that would either reinforce or undermine these.

WHAT WE DID

We designed and facilitated a series of interactive employee workshops to explore the role of values in organisational behaviour and decision-making and whether the current values were suitably future-focused. Through a hands on ‘card sort’ activity participants collaboratively arrived at a set of values for the organisation to ‘let go’ versus values that must be ‘preserved and protected’ and those that must be ‘developed new’ to support future success. Participants then took part in a ‘tagline competition’ to generate descriptions of the values in language that resonated and was meaningful to them. 

Consolidated output from these workshops was validated at a subsequent senior manager offsite that we also designed and facilitated. In this session senior managers worked together to explore what the validated set of ‘future proofed’ values meant in relation to ‘on track’ and ‘off track’ leadership behaviours. The collation and documentation of these behavioural guideposts was an important precursor to further leadership development work to support bringing the values to life through senior role models.