Brilliance Within was recently contracted to create and implement a culture and leadership framework with Catalyst Clinical Research, a company well on its way to exceeding $100m in revenue and establishing a meaningful, sustainable expansion over the next five years.
When the partnership began, senior leadership at Catalyst had a lot on their plate. They were executing an ambitious business strategy and creating a culture to support that strategy. They were seeing early signs of the consequences of not putting enough emphasis on the company’s culture.
The challenges came in the form of cross-functional collaboration, constant fire drills, a “command and control” approach to management, and the company’s employees feeling disconnected from each other and from the company itself.
Catalyst leaders had a strong vision for their desired culture, with a goal of creating a high-performing organization where people loved to work, but they needed help to do so. They needed a partner to translate their vision into something that would be scalable, sustainable, and teachable to all leaders and employees.
In three years, they accomplished that mission. The outstanding business results seen by Catalyst as a direct result of this process are outlined below.
1. Increased employee satisfaction and happiness, leading to increased brand value
Implementing the C3 framework has increased employee happiness.
The “People First” aspect of the framework helped to create a sense of family, aided by respect for diversity, equality, and inclusion. Catalyst is a happy place to come to work, and this shines through in their customer service, quality feedback, and in staff members’ displays of psychological safety.
2. Senior leadership clarity and involvement in the purpose and rollout of the C3 Culture
The C3 Leadership Training is designed to provide common language and management tools to leadership within the company, so that they can reinforce C3 to influence how managers interact with their staff.
40 or so staff were initially involved and provided feedback which was then used to adapt the program; this iterative, self-reflective process continues today. Most Catalyst leaders acknowledge that the reach to middle management levels and below is a work-in-progress in this growing company which has amalgamated three businesses.
The focus on culture at Catalyst began before their partnership with Brilliance Within began, with initial work intended to identify the core values of the organization. Brilliance Within’s initial work with Catalyst was aimed at crystallising these values and ensuring they would have resonance throughout the company.
3. Employee buy-in serving to support retention and enhanced recruitment opportunities
It is no coincidence that Catalyst has an industry leading 2% staff attrition rate, in excess of 700 staff (some 325 employees and in excess of 400 contractors) and offices in the US and EU.
Employees’ buy-in of C3 has been leveraged by ongoing, appropriate communication with ELT members. At Catalyst, “no one is unapproachable”, in what is characterised as “…a work hard, play hard, accepting, and welcoming culture, regardless of who you are.”
There was initial hesitancy as to the purpose and nature of C3 among employees, but it was swiftly defeated by the open, honest, and well-explained nature of the C3 Rollout. Catalyst has been able to show some skeptics that this is a powerful, unifying foundation. But it still has some work to do. According to CEO Nick Dyer, “The fact this is organic, and not some box checking program, increases the opportunity to make it part of the DNA.”
4. Establishing a culture of agreements enhanced morale, productivity and revenue
One of the foundational principles driving success in C3 is the development of an environment which relies on clear, inter-party, co-created agreements, thus avoiding unclear or unspoken expectations.
This proved transformational for Nick Dyer and his team at Catalyst. It helped them transition from unspoken or unclear expectations and assumptions to clear pathways of agreement and engagement with individuals and teams.
The impact of Catalyst previously operating from a framework based on expectations included:
- The existence of tension between some leaders and their teams
- The executive team had to put in a massive amount of energy and time to resolve issues and ensure the right things were done in the organization.
- Commitments made in meetings and conversations were not followed up on, and individuals weren’t consistently keeping one another in the loop on actions taken
- There were pockets of high morale and pockets of low morale, but no consistency across the organization. The state of morale was largely based on individual managers, and this inconsistency negatively impacted cross-team collaboration.
As the shift to agreements has been made, the energy expended in dealing with these issues has been deployed to collaborating on executing the business’ growth plans and delivering on clients’ needs.
5. Stronger strategic alliances, deal completion, and increased customer satisfaction
Catalyst now has over 120 customers and is consistently growing in a steady, sustainable way. Sustainable innovation requires a strong sense of culture to convert processes to revenue. It is clear that Catalyst’s robust policies, procedures and protocols, and context-specific decision making abilities only serve to provide a virtuous cycle as the company continues to grow.
6. Context-specific decision making
The “People First” ethos is strong at Catalyst, and one of the core tenets of “people first” is giving them autonomy in their work. This led to a view that too much process and red tape can slow a team down and limit its effectiveness.
Catalyst now operates through a culture of guidelines rather than rules, with less reliance on inflexible work instructions and more on “fluid guidelines”, operating within the spirit of C3 and Company Values. The company acknowledges the need for context-specific decision making as opposed to policy/procedure-dictated decisions. For this to occur, the art of listening, flexibility, coaching, and empowerment are all important contributors.
With an industry leading 2% staff attrition rate, well on its way to exceeding $100m revenue and continuing its high, yet flexible, customer-centric growth trajectory, Catalyst is now building momentum as it reaps the rich benefits that have been crystallized by the introduction of the C3 Framework within their organization. The focus is now on process, communication, and training, while also prioritizing the laying of sound foundations for future growth.