Building a high-performance culture to drive growth at an investment management company
Case Study

The challenge
In today’s tough and rapidly changing environment, many organisations are going through re-structuring and cost base reduction to ensure that they remain resilient and competitive. Whilst this is a critical activity, and one that needs continued focus, simultaneously attention needs to be paid to growth.
Our client recognised that growth would be driven by a greater client focus underpinned by the creation of a high-performance culture (HPC). Internally they had defined the cultural shift necessary, and the executive and the P&C team understood that more was needed to codify and drive the change. We were asked to help bring the concepts to life for leaders in a practical way, to deliver team accelerator events
In our view, high performing organisations have three things in common:
- They produce high-quality relevant products, have relentless client or customer focus and the ability to adapt.
- They are clear about what they are aiming to achieve which cascades down into unambiguous and measurable objectives. This drives accountability, both shared and individual.
- They have great leaders who provide clear direction plus support and challenge in equal measure to maximise performance.
Context is key
In preparation for each event, we spent time with the team leader to get under the skin of the issues they were facing. Through a combination of team wide semi structured interviews and wider team and client surveys we were able to take a data-based approach to creating tailored solutions within the framework below

Keeping it alive
Whilst great progress has been made and the teams were very energised by the open dialogue and the actions they committed to; it is critical that ongoing attention is paid to team dynamics to shift the culture further towards high performance. This organisation certainly isn’t taking its eyes of the ball. They check in regularly on their commitments, continue to raise the bar, face into the harder to shift behaviours and are going from strength to strength.