Unifying teams within a global consulting firm

The challenge

Lodestar partnered with a well-established consulting firm that boasted a diverse talent base of over 500,000 associates across 46 countries. The company acts as a strategic partner, providing IT consultancy, services, and solutions to customers worldwide.

Leadership was experiencing challenges with a longstanding and strategic relationship with an internal client, which was part of the same parent group. Both parties recognised that they were working an outdated supplier-vendor model and wanted to shift to a ‘one team’ model, with a shared vision and common goals. They understood that teamwork is a strategic choice, and were willing to invest the necessary time, energy, and discipline to be successful and to maximise the partnership’s potential.

As a first step, and to create a baseline, the combined internal team sent out a customised questionnaire to around 200 employees. They wanted to engage an objective third party to analyse the data without bias and provide recommendations in response to the findings – and this is where we stepped in.

Our approach

Firstly, we immersed ourselves in the data. The questionnaire consisted of a combination of binary (yes/no) and open-source questions, which provided both quantitative and qualitative data. We used demographics to highlight differences in perspectives by business, discipline, region, and tenure, and completed a process of thematic analysis to extract key themes which we were able to compare and contrast between the two partners. This enabled us to demonstrate where there was consistency in terms of satisfaction levels and identify gaps that presented opportunities for improvement.

Our key findings and recommendations:

• There was a very high response rate which demonstrated positive levels of engagement
• A shared vision/purpose was needed to underpin the “One team, dream team” ambition
• There was an opportunity to build more trust between the two parties to enable the open dialogue necessary for a true partnership
• There was limited opportunity to share new ideas and drive innovation
• It was clear from the analysis of the closed questions (see below) that one party was much more positive than the other about the relationship:
  – Is the governance / meeting cadence satisfactory?
  – Is a timely response provided by the counterparts to business needs?
  – Is there an exchange of innovative thinking between partners?
  – Is the quality of the product / service given priority?
  – Are the partners leveraging each other’s high-end capabilities for co-creation?
  – Is the current partnership mutually beneficial, ie, is value being generated for both companies?

The anecdotal comments were drawn from three questions:

• What works well?
• Where are the pain points?
• What are your recommendations for improvement?

The thematic analysis revealed several consistent themes, as illustrated below.

Triangulating all this feedback enabled us to make some recommendations which we played back to the leadership teams of each organisation in facilitated debrief sessions. These suggestions included:

• Holding leader briefings on the outcomes of the relationship survey
• Sharing survey results with teams, collectively if possible
• Getting commitment to change from both teams
• Holding high-functioning team leader workshops and team workshops
• Committing to actions
• Re-running the relationship survey after six months to measure improvement

The findings resonated with both teams and were well-received. We had brought data to bear on some of the issues that were being felt between the two teams, enabling evidence-based decisions to be made on the priority recommendations and actions.