Culture diagnostics and leadership interventions across a regional network

The firm had committed to building an inclusive culture, and the inclusion team was how that commitment got held. When something in an office ran against it, we went and looked.

Offices rarely present the actual problem. What arrives is a symptom: people leaving a particular group, a promotion round that looks wrong, a working environment that colleagues describe carefully and won't put in writing.

I was usually brought in by someone rather than assigned — an office leader, or a colleague from another team who had something they couldn't take anywhere else. The work started with diagnosis: what was happening, who it affected, how much of it was one individual's behaviour and how much was how the office had come to run itself. That stage is mostly listening, and it takes longer than anyone wants it to.

The intervention came after, built for that office and its market rather than lifted from a regional template, and agreed with the leadership who would have to hold it once I'd gone. Some of that was direct work with the leaders themselves. Some was changing how a process ran, so that the outcome people were complaining about stopped being produced.

The measure was the following year's culture review. Offices I worked with showed improvement across successive annual reviews, which is slower and less flattering than a completion rate, and the only measure that tells you whether anything held.

I've kept the specifics out. The situations would be identifiable to the people who were in them, and most of them are still there.