Organisational Development

Developing your values

Organisational values shape how your people deliver results and interact with each other and your stakeholders. They are the beliefs, principles and attitudes that shape how people work. They are also a declaration to the world about what your organisation stands for and thinks is important.

With non-profit, charity and public organisations under greater public scrutiny to demonstrate ethical work and behaviour, it is not enough to simply list your values on your website. To maintain your reputation, values need to be displayed through behaviours, embedded in processes and apparent in decision-making.

We can help you create a set of meaningful values through an inclusive process, so that they are owned by people at all levels of your organisation.

Once developed, or if you have your values already, we can help you identify the implications of these values. We will support you to develop a set of behaviours that bring the values to life. As your critical friend, we will help you create approaches to reinforce these behaviours and challenge those that contradict the values. We can also help you embed your values through your recruitment, decision-making, performance management, communications and leadership behaviours.

New ways of working

In uncertain and changing times, to ensure continued organisational success you may have to address a range of internal and external challenges or take advantage of opportunities that arise. This can require new ways of working, new skills and new mindsets. =mc can help you design and deliver these new approaches and support your staff to own and drive through any needed changes. Examples of ways we have helped non-profit, charity and public organisations include:

• From service delivery to co-creation: supporting a local authority department as it became an independent organisation. We helped staff move from delivering services to working with users to design the services they want. This involved creating new strategies and ways of working and supporting staff with new skills and expertise.
• Making matrix management work: supporting a UN agency to work within a matrix management environment. Matrix management enables sharing of talent and skills across departments, but to work needs clear lines of accountability and the right mind-set. We supported the Senior Management Team to agree levels of responsibilities, structure, ways of working and decision-making approaches to ensure staff were supported to succeed.
• Managing internal customers: supporting a national charity to re-organise their professional services department from back-office administration to an effective business partnering model. HR, IT and finance were seen as support functions expected to react to other departments’ needs. We helped them change this to become trusted advisors delivering effective services that meet emerging business needs. This involved supporting people to interpret complex briefs, turn conversations into solutions, co-create projects, share knowledge effectively and work collaboratively to make decisions.
• Empowering through a restructure: supporting an arts organisation to create a new level of senior management. The Executive Team recognised they needed to move from operational to strategic leadership and that meant devolving responsibilities to a newly formed team of Heads of Department. We helped the Executive Team and Heads to identify their new purpose, roles and responsibilities. We supported them to agree where and how decisions would be made and what information needs to be shared and when.
• Resourcing for results: supporting an international organisation to set up effective portfolio management across their programmatic work. Portfolio management enables organisations to manage resources and prioritise work that best achieves strategic objectives. We supported the executive and senior management team to set up portfolio management and to define and agree new ways of working, responsibilities and decision-making processes.
• Scenario planning: supporting a national arts organisation to plan for the future. Like many organisations they know their future income and operations are dependent on the decisions of other bodies. This makes it hard to plan when those decisions haven’t yet been made. We supported them to identify and think through the implications of different scenarios. We then helped them to make strategic and internal changes that would make them ready for, and succeed in, any of these scenarios.
• From good to great: supporting a charitable trust, set up to run services on behalf of a council to transform into a sustainable, effective and agile organisation. We helped them take an innovative approach to services, develop commercial awareness and fundraising expertise. We also used the Jim Collins’ Good to Great model to help them navigate the changes they made to their leadership, their thinking and their work.
• Embedding project management: supporting a national charity to design and embed a fit for purpose project management framework. We worked with the executive team and project managers across the organisation to identify and define an organisational specific approach for effective project and programmatic delivery. This has resulted in a shared organisational language, toolkit and approach to support all staff in delivering projects successfully.