CAST

Challenge

Digital start-up CAST were growing their high performing team to meet demand of their services and the development of a broad partnership network. They had a supportive and effective culture but it was implicit and centred on the example set by the CEO. As the organisation grew, it was going to be important to codify the culture for new staff and to augment it to make it suitable for greater scale.

Approach

We facilitated a number of sessions to pin down CAST's values, vision and mission in order to develop a shared understanding amongst the team and for us to gain a sense of 'what' the organisation stood for, 'how' they sought to achieve change and the qualities they held highest in doing so.

It's important to understand how an organisation's values are manifesting so we spent time with the team to learn the key elements of the existing culture; interviewing all staff and shadowing the CEO. We mapped all their ways of working including all the communication tools and how they were used (particularly important as CAST is a 'remote first' organisation).

Armed with a range of insights and 'how might we' questions, we created and tested prototypes of resources, trainings and tools on a small scale with team members.

Solution

After testing , we had a suite of tools to support the culture going forwards.

It's important to make it very easy for people to remember the key behaviours of a culture and to embody them. For this reason we developed 'three golden rules' that, if upheld by the team, who create a ripple out effect and manifest the culture across the organisation and into partnerships. The golden rules for CAST are:

1. Ask for help every day - offering to help is great, but asking for help develops supportive relationships more rapidly.

2. Mirror back what you've just heard - repeating back to someone what they've just said is a spookily powerful way of enabling a person to feel respected and seen.

3. Offer up gratitude - intentional thanks and recognition of another's work develops bonds and increases the quality of future work.

Although these rules are essentially relational, the associated behaviours have a clear and positive impact on operational excellence. The CAST team now have them embedded in their working tools, like Slack, so that small reminders encourage the team to bring

Simple work tools, like meeting planners, with key culture elements embedded within them. So they, be valuable for new team members

Coaching training for all team members

Matt worked with us to understand and articulate how we best work together as a team and with our extended network of partners. Starting with research into our existing culture, values and mission, he created a set of tools and processes for us to maintain the best parts of our existing culture, adding in what we'd need to further develop our team bonds and relationships. We now have a set of golden rules and practices that shape great interactions that we continue to use and build from. It was brilliant to work with Matt, and we continue to build on these tools and approaches today.