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Our culture

Respect for Employees, Associates, Collaborators, Stakeholders and their families

We treat our employees in a respectful, fair, non-exploitative way.  We pay a great deal of attention to the negotiation of mutually beneficial contracts, which go beyond a financial commitment to each other, to also include co-learning and support:

  • We promote open, constructive dialogue with everyone we work with, with shared decision making and working conditions that are safe, healthy, and non-coercive.
  • We encourage our workers (of whatever type of contract) to pay attention to the quality of their home and societal life as we believe that a business cannot flourish when those working in it are distressed, lonely, over-worked or out of balance.
  • The flourishing of our team, and the joy and fulfilment in our work is every bit as important to us as the success for our client.
  • We are transparent, respectful and fair to local populations, investors, suppliers and other stakeholders outside our organisation who may be affected by our operations.  For example, we drive with care and responsibility for other people, and are thoughtful about how we use space, time and energy from those we are with.

We work collaboratively with our communities to enhance the well-being of others.  This includes actions such as offering pro-bono or reduced rate work to charities, local communities and organisations.  Current examples of this include:

  • Providing free workshop design and facilitation to a major young persons’ Cancer Charity in the South West
  • Providing free or much reduced rates for leadership and culture consulting, coaching, support and challenge to a number of organisations implicated in the Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, for example Schools and institutions running schools. 

Diversity, inclusion and equality

  • We promote diversity and use hiring practices that are fair, responsible, non-discriminatory, and non-exploitative for our employees and suppliers.  
  • We develop best practice in and with our clients, and challenge poor practice, even if it is inconvenient or risky to do so.

Mutual partnership with our customers

  • We are honest and fair with our customers, competing fairly for their business, respecting their privacy and providing them safe and effective products and services under the conditions we promise.
  • For us, good consulting starts with shared responsibility, honesty and authenticity and an equal desire to achieve success.  When we work in real partnership with clients the synergies, learning and differences can bring extraordinary results.  
  • We encourage learning, through modelling a learning approach ourselves – we see ourselves as a learn-ing consultancy, not a learn-ed consultancy – bringing rigor, quality and support combined with genuine inquiry and curiosity.
  • Our belief is that organisations only really implement those things that they believe in, and mostly only really believe in the things they create themselves.  We see our job as working with our clients in such a way as to help them to discover their latent capabilities, options and future scenarios in a way that leaves them even more capable of doing this without further external intervention.  This means that we need to work with a light-touch – not taking on work that clients could resource internally – combined with offering our expertise and ideas where they add value.  We believe that this is the stuff that long-term relationships are made of – not through creating dependence and feelings of inadequacy.
  • We ensure that all the major constituencies/groupings inside a client organisation are involved in the process and that they stay coordinated and connected throughout.  This means creating understanding and collaborative action between executive champions, internal (and often very powerful) customers within the organisation, and those at the heart of the change.
  • We hold in balance the clarity of purpose and tangible results from a change process while accepting the need to adapt and respond to learning as it emerges.   Staying open to the emergence of new possibilities – accepting that we will not know all of the answers at the start of the journey, and that if the process is working, we are likely to discover new questions as well as new answers.
  • We develop appropriate metrics and reporting mechanisms to align with client processes for evaluating and reporting on progress.  This might include, for example regular conversations with senior leaders to share learning and explore both appropriate quantitative measures and qualitative findings.