Highly Desired Team and Culture Dynamics

How can we make our leadership team and our organisational culture the best it can be?

The Arbiter Team enables clients to build and sustain agile executive and management teams who internalise their individual and collective accountability to develop and sustain positive and impactful team dynamics. Our cultural values work helps clients pinpoint the strengths and development areas of their current culture, the culture that they really want to reflect, the gap between the two and then how to address this gap pragmatically and effectively.

Client outcomes:

Partnership Team Facilitation in a Top Tier Partnership Group

The Arbiter team prepared and executed a series of carefully crafted workshops and individual sessions with the partners in a top tier consulting organisation. The group had some challenges in making difficult decisions and was concerned that their previous strong internal relationships were being dissipated. Our work enabled the partners to become a more cohesive and integrated team, and accelerated their decision-making through being able to discuss difficult issues more openly and with greater resolution. This work also included a Values Assessment regarding current and desired values which assisted in transitioning to renewed relationships and interactions.

Facilitation of Team Integration Following an Acquisition

The Arbiter team worked with the C-level merged teams, and then their managers’ teams to help accelerate the integration of team members immediately following the acquisition of one media company by another. We worked closely with executive and management teams over a short time frame to assist them in quickly building a foundation of trust, getting to know each other as people, developing and implementing ground-rules for ‘ways of working’, agreed values and behaviours.

Refocusing Enabling Functions and Governance in a Major R&D Organisation

The Arbiter team was commissioned to complete a functional review of the enabling function of a major scientific research and development organisation. The review team identified broader issues related to clarity of focus, prioritisation, team interaction, accountability, and governance. Working with the CEO and the broader 25 person leadership team over three months elapsed time, we recommended approaches to shape and drive consistent priorities, to refocus and simplify organisational governance, different approaches to accountabilities, and the re-working of enabling functions in a business services group. This work had a profound impact on the organisation, with broader recommendations than initially envisaged.  These were then successfully implemented and had significant cultural ramifications.

We really enjoyed the sessions and team has come quite a way since that first session which we think is largely due to how the Arbiter team facilitated difficult conversations.   It’s quite an art facilitating a large group like that and getting them to open up in the way that you did.

We wanted to say thank you very much for the group and one on one sessions. They were very helpful and there has been a huge shift in how some of us are interacting and working now and that alone has made a big difference. The Arbiter team was engaged to examine the effectiveness of how some our functions supported our core business. They provided professional and independent interaction with the senior management team and engaged the team in identifying and discussing a range of options to enhance how we worked together, how we integrated our different approaches, and how we could enhance the efficiency of our operations. The report gave the CEO a platform to undertake some necessary change with a clear path to the best way to re-configure the executive team to then best support business growth.