Transformation Story: Government Agency

Context: Government Agency — Change Culture of Department Through Long-Term Contract.

Challenge: A government agency wanted to change their culture from a top-down management style to a more collaborative environment whereby management was more accountable, empowered, self-reliant, and needing less direction from the top, and to integrate the new culture throughout the company.

Approach: We curated a long-term process—using various methodologies—that supported the team to engage in new ways of cultivating trust, leading together, and assuming mastery. This included co-creation meetings, department head interviews, an all-day leadership lab with horse-assisted learning, private coaching sessions for the agency head, a half-day integration workshop, and concluded with an all-day staff retreat.

 Impact: There were the following outcomes:

• Leadership team gained trust, safety and dialog with one another.
• Each member of the team stepped into their strengths.
• Top executives, liberated by the leadership team’s self-reliance, took on new roles that better fit their own professional and personal aspirations.
• The remaining team is now working together, transforming the entire agency as a whole, into a unified, engaged presence.
• They have gained attention as a model organization within a much larger entity.
• As a result of their organizational change approach, the agency is being recognized as a revolutionary workplace environment.

Midway through the contract, the leadership team committed to regular semi-monthly Wisdom Circles, which created an opportunity for them to come together, not in the usual meeting capacity, but as colleagues and co-mentors to continue supporting one another in stepping into their new evolving capacities thereby continuing the agency’s positive evolutionary process.