Organizational culture

Harness the power of your organizational culture to help drive your strategy

Want an agile, self-sustaining and successful organization? Make the culture conversation a must-have item on your leadership agenda

Culture is the essence of how your people interact and work—it’s how things get done. For most organizations, it can be elusively complex, difficult to manage and hard to change. There is a way forward that harnesses culture to unleash the potential of your people and organization.

According to our research and observations and in collaboration with the Katzenbach Center, the institute for culture, leadership and teaming at Strategy&, this is true for dozens of enterprises, including some of the most successful businesses in the world.

How we can help

Culture assessment

Understand the culture you have and use it to drive key business initiatives. Our Culture Assessment aligns organizational goals with what inspires your people to achieve them. Growth, cost-cutting, M&A, inclusion—culture can help you get there faster.

How we can help: Diagnose how culture and behaviors can help or hinder your goals; help set your direction and path to evolution.

  • Establish culture baseline including strengths to accelerate transformation and pain points to address
  • Align on culture aspirations
  • Prioritize critical few behaviors that will drive greater alignment between culture, operating model and strategy
  • Develop culture evolution roadmap

Culture activation

Overcome workforce skepticism, stress and fatigue by fully activating your culture. Creating greater coherence between organizational asks and employee efforts, our Culture Activation brings “formal” mechanisms in line with culture to energize your people and engage them emotionally.

How we can help: Catalyze and sustain change by building a movement that energizes and reinforces desired behaviors.

  • Develop a program for cultural performance acceleration and risk management
  • Enlist and coach formal leaders; identify and engage informal leaders and networks
  • Deploy behavior enablers—nudging, experiments, pilots
  • Measure behavior adoption, its impact on performance and track culture evolution over time

Team experience

Unleash team potential and drive business performance with the right experiences and targeted coaching. With our focus on Team Experience, we can help build new capabilities that translate vision and strategy into substantive action.

How we can help: Strengthen cultural teaming capabilities throughout the organization in support of business priorities

  • Assess teaming capabilities and identify improvement areas
  • Engage groups in a series of dialogues to clarify passions/purpose, practice new skills/behaviors, make commitments and align with business outcomes
  • Support and coach team leaders to unlock individual and team potential
  • Monitor and support sustainable progress

Leadership impact & evolution

Empower your people through your leaders. Leadership Impact & Evolution provides necessary experiences, coaching and support to help leaders build teams, plan effectively and create an environment where people can be authentic, vulnerable with each other and thrive. 

Leaders need experiences, coaching and support to team, plan and prepare effectively so they can in turn empower the people around them.

How we can help: Tap into the power of effective leadership at all levels

  • Improve C-suite and Board level teaming effectiveness—identify gaps, create alignment and build new capabilities 
  • Drive leadership signaling actions and behaviors as a critical enabler of business transformation
  • Measure leadership effectiveness—implementing KPIs and a measurement framework; establishing the appropriate incentive structure to support performance

Culture Thumbprint Diagnostic, a tech-enabled solution

Diagnosing your organization’s current culture is the first step in putting your culture to work to help accelerate transformation. The Katzenbach Center's Culture Thumbprint Diagnostic is a tech-enabled solution that can identify cultural strengths and points of pride, as well as pain points, which enables you to tap into the strengths and mitigate challenges, therefore unlocking performance. Work with us to:

  • Identify nuances of organization culture
  • Create coherence between culture and strategy
  • Understand ways of working across different demographics

Explore further

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PwC’s 2021 Global Culture Survey

Get the latest insights on where organizational culture is headed

For the past 25 years, the Katzenbach Center, the institute for culture, leadership and teaming at Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting group, has been studying the influence of culture on business success. This year we surveyed 3,200 participants to reflect on their experiences during the COVID-19 crisis. The results show that for some organizations culture was the hero of their pandemic story. While we’re moving toward a post-pandemic world in the U.S., business leaders can glean insights by looking back at the lessons learned.

Explore findings

Results powering tomorrow’s potential

Transitioned 4,000 employees to a modern technology platform

A utilities client was challenged to embrace a technology-enabled business model after experiencing changes in customer demands and larger industry disruptions. We collaborated with them to conduct a culture diagnosis to enable modern technology and enhance processes.

Implemented behavior change to empower employees and drive transformation goals

A chemicals company client determined that a new manufacturing production system was necessary to support rapid performance improvements. We helped them with a worker-driven employee activation to accelerate change.

Coached 50 transformation initiatives and 300+ people to run culture activations

A large global asset management firm worked with us to conduct culture activation pilots to help accelerate their corporate strategy. We identified a "Critical Few" behaviors to embed the aspirational culture traits in specific business areas, developed enterprise-wide behaviors, and created, implemented and transitioned a plan for scaling and spreading the behaviors.

“PwC distinguishes itself in culture transformations through its organization transformation center of excellence, the Katzenbach Center”

The Forrester Wave™: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Practices, Q4 2020

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Contact us

Reid Carpenter

Reid Carpenter

Managing Director and US Lead, The Katzenbach Center, PwC US

Christopher Hannegan

Christopher Hannegan

Principal, Transformation, PwC US

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