Fixing Broken Cultures with Ceneé LaTulippe

Can we stop just for one second and you tell us a bit about what your firm does for the audience? I think that would be super useful.

Yeah, sure.

So we're a consulting agency that typically is helping mid-market companies and private equity or private equity-backed companies through significant strategic shifts.

So that could be post-merger, that could be a significant product investment and development, a rebranding.

Anything that typically spans the entire business and changes the trajectory of where they're going and that adoption, people, process, and technology are gonna be critical.

So

that's what we do.

Amazing.

And when you first get one of these projects and say it's a moment of change in an organization's direction.

So what is the first thing that you do? What's the first thing you tend to do? Is it hitting the business from a business perspective or was it looking at culture first or what are the first things you do?

Yeah.

So we tend to really focus first on asking our executive sponsor, what is success? What does success look like in 12 months? What does it look like in 18 months? Or whatever the objective from a duration, what's that goal? When we understand what success is, then we ask them, where are you at today? And what's keeping you up at night? What is the things that you are a are gonna go wrong.

And when we understand where the target is and where they're at today and the things that in their gut is challenging, now we use that as kind of our two core anchors to then start to work through each of the different stakeholders understand maybe a mini version of those same questions and start to piece together the picture, the picture of risks and issues, the picture of objectives.

We also start to see if there's misalignment in that assessment across all the different leadership.

And then we work really hard on gaining.

We got to get a North Star in place, ensure that everybody knows where we're going and be really thoughtful and really direct about where we are today.

And do you find that often the people who are at the top of these companies' gut feeling is maybe off and they're worried about things that actually are less critical? Or do you think they tend to be pretty accurate?

Yeah, I think it's definitely the type of leader that's late in the company, right? So you do have some leaders who are a bit disconnected from their teams.

And so what I hear from them... can be a bit off from what I hear from their leadership team.

That happens, but the good news is we become a trusted advisor.

So we have no problem coming back to that leader and saying, all right, well, this is where you think is going on, but here's what's actually going on.

But don't worry, like we're not trying to bring you a problem.

We're telling you your perception is off and here's how we're gonna adjust it and how we wanna partner with you to make it better.

And we try to gain that partnership, that alignment, and that agreement.

And in those, I'm gonna say disconnected leadership situations, sometimes they don't wanna jump back in, but they wanna kind of be kept in on the read and improve their pulse on their organization.