The Katzenbach Center helps clients close the strategy-through-execution gap by putting their cultures to work. With a network of practitioners advising across multiple industries, geographies, and client situations, we guide clients as they tap the power of their cultures and unlock the wisdom of teams to foster performance. Our time-tested methodology and focused thought leadership is rooted in the original works of leading organizational strategy advisor and best-selling author, Jon Katzenbach.
The success of any transformation effort depends on whether and how leaders engage their culture. Culture, however, is different from other business topics: it is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational — that’s what makes it so hard to work with, but that’s also what makes it so powerful. Bestselling author Jon Katzenbach and coauthors James Thomas and Gretchen Anderson, have written a practical guide to working with culture and tapping into a source of catalytic change within your organization.
The Critical Few
A middle eastern national oil company was facing a significant demographic shift in their workforce and an increasingly competitive external environment. To succeed in this new environment, the client developed an ambitious long-term strategic plan. Leadership soon realized that in order for the plan to succeed, they needed to leverage the strengths of their existing culture and get emotional commitment from the organization. Together, we prioritized 4 critical behaviors and deployed them across a series of pilots. Ultimately, we recorded business performance improvements that were directly attributable to behavior change. Talk to one of our experts about your organization's culture A North American car manufacturer on the brink of bankruptcy tackled its deeply embedded culture after formal changes—reshaping strategy and optimizing costs—weren’t moving the needle far enough. To evolve the culture in a sustainable way, the organization relied on leaders to role model new behaviors and leveraged "authentic informal leaders" to spread the behaviors throughout the organization rapidly. Ultimately, the effort resulted in faster decision-making, increased accountability, and improved customer and product focus. Talk to one of our experts about your organization's culture Following a number of leadership changes and declining performance in the market, a tech company CEO began to wonder if culture wasn’t the problem. Her organization had a long history, steeped in pride, but she felt it was adrift. We helped them redefine their ecosystem of values, core principles, leadership attributes, behaviors, and "rallying cry" that made the culture unique and compelling. To help the message spread and behaviors stick, the client engaged ~1,250 "pride builders" across 85 countries globally. Within a year, engagement scores increased by 10%. Talk to one of our experts about how to engage your informal organization A banking group in ANZSEA had experienced rapid, inorganic growth resulting in diverse and opposing ways of working, and was looking forward to achieving aggressive 5 year targets. We helped the bank understand its cultural strengths across divisions / locations and use them to accelerate priority strategic imperatives. First, we engaged with leaders to diagnose the existing culture and sub-cultures. We identified a long list of behaviors and refined them into three critical behaviors that the organization spread across a workforce of 40,000+. Talk to one of our experts about how to get the most out of your teams
What we do
Oil company
Car manufacturer
IT company
Banking group
Oil company facing a challenging road ahead
Car manufacturer recovered from the brink
Information technology company re-found its mojo
Pulling together the best diverse team
What we think
Views from 2,000 leaders and employees in the latest Katzenbach Center Global Culture Survey.
Across 60 countries, 2,280 executives offer insight into how their companies invest in and deliver on the promise of digital. The findings reveal what successful companies are getting right, and what their peers need to do to catch up.
“It’s so exciting that we’ve identified the critical few behaviors that are going to move the needle on our organization’s performance. But — now what?!” asks pretty much every one of my clients, ever.
As workplaces increasingly embrace the telecommuting model, leaders can take several steps to bridge cultural and interpersonal gaps.
Featured books
Bestselling author Jon Katzenbach and coauthors James Thomas and Gretchen Anderson, have written a practical guide to working with culture and tapping into a source of catalytic change within your organization.
Jon Katzenbach and co-author Douglas K. Smith interviewed hundreds of people from 30 companies to reveal what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best, and how to enhance their effectiveness.
Jon Katzenbach writes about how pride can motivate employees to achieve higher performance and how instilling pride can be achieved.
Through case studies from enterprises of all sizes around the world, Jon Katzenbach and co-author Zia Khan reveal how top-level organizations balance informal and formal elements to achieve outstanding results.
Culture is the self-sustaining patterns of behaviors and mindsets that determine how work gets done. Many business leaders understand that culture plays an important role in business performance, but most struggle to align culture with strategy and fully harness this power. We help clients work with and within their existing cultures to drive long-term performance. Our emphasis on a critical few behaviors over mindsets is what differentiates our approach. Teams are a flexible and efficient way to enhance organizational performance. Clients can utilize the power of disciplined teaming to further strategic objectives. In the 20 years since Jon Katzenbach wrote The Wisdom of Teams, our experience and approach on leadership and “high performing” teams have helped many clients succeed across a wide range of business problems and industries. We believe organizations that leverage their informal networks have a greater potential to achieve business results. Our tools and techniques related to identifying and engaging Authentic Informal Leaders (AILs) help clients harness the energy and skills of key people to spread critical behaviors. Pride Building in particular is premised on a simple idea: every organization has a group of employees who excel at motivating colleagues to achieve stellar results.
Key topic areas
Drawing on recent research and real examples, the article’s authors present a new approach to cultural evolution that leverages what’s strongest in an organization’s existing culture, providing a practical road map for real, substantive evolution in employees’ ways of behaving by focusing on few critical shifts.
Companies can tap their natural advantage when they focus on changing a few important behaviors, enlist informal leaders, and harness the power of employees’ emotions.
Companies with the most effective culture seek out and continually reinforce so-called keystone habits. Companies that recognize and encourage such habits stand to build cultures with influence that goes beyond employee engagement and directly boosts performance.
Organizations that turn digital disruption into something that works for them rather than against them should be working now to evolve their culture.
Katzenbach and Smith's research involved interviews with hundreds of people from thirty companies, and revealed what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best, and how to enhance their effectiveness.
Companies should appeal to the millennial workforce by using three attributes of effective teaming — shared leadership, strong emotional commitment, and flexibility.
While the fundamental theory of team performance is perhaps well known, many teams fall short of their full potential because they fail to move from theory to execution.
Analysis of informal networks offers a potent leadership model for the C-suite: Make top teams the hub of the enterprise, and watch performance improve.
Organizations should follow a rigorous approach to determine who the pride builders are, and then build on their insights and capabilities to influence behaviors. Pride builders can be helpful allies in spreading both motivational behaviors and performance behaviors.
Article on how integrating formal metrics and informal communication can lead to new levels of performance. Also, check out Jon Katzenbach’s book on the same topic.
Jon Katzenbach writes about how pride can motivate employees to achieve higher performance and how instilling pride can be achieved.
Leaders can learn a lot from the late Apple CEO, but not all of it should be emulated.
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