Client Background
The client is a European global engineering and technology company with operations across multiple countries and a strong presence in India. As part of its expansion, the client had acquired a segment of an American competitor’s business in India, including its Pune Global Capability Centre (GCC). The transition brought together teams with different organisational histories, cultures and ways of working. With the acquired business becoming part of the client’s team, there was a need to help people managers understand the new organisational culture and, more importantly, translate it into a team culture that employees could experience through their everyday work.
The Challenge
Following the transition, the organisation recognised that simply communicating the new organisational values would not be enough. People managers would play a critical role in determining how those values were understood, demonstrated and experienced by their teams.
The workshop therefore focused on a key question: How do people managers actually implement culture within their teams?
The objective was not simply to explain the new culture, but to help managers understand their role in making it visible through everyday decisions, interactions and ways of working.
Our Approach
Although the engagement was delivered as a focused workshop, the work involved considerably more than workshop delivery. Before designing the workshop, we first sought to understand the cultural transition taking place. The teams came from different organisational environments, with their own established ways of thinking, communicating and working. Their previous organisational cultures, combined with differences in business environments and geographical influences, could shape how people approached collaboration, decision-making and team dynamics.
Once we understood the previous and current cultural contexts, conducted a pre-assessment, identified the areas that needed to be addressed and then designed an experiential workshop specifically for the transition.
This ensured that the program addressed the realities of a post-acquisition culture integration, rather than treating culture as a standalone training topic.
The Flow of the Day
Below was the format in which the day was designed:
Section 1: Understanding the New Culture
The workshop began by helping managers explore and understand the new organisational culture through metaphoric and experiential group activities. Rather than simply presenting values on a slide, participants were encouraged to interpret what the culture meant in practice, discuss different perspectives and identify the behaviours that could bring those values to life.
This helped shift the conversation from: “What are our organisational values?” to: “What should these values look like when our teams actually work?”
Section 2: From Organisational Culture to Team Culture
A key part of the workshop was helping people managers understand that team culture should emerge from and reinforce organisational culture.
Managers explored how they wanted their own teams to operate and what behaviours, expectations and ways of working would support the larger organisational culture.
They were encouraged to define the team culture they wanted to create rather than leaving culture to develop informally.
Section 3: Building Cross-Functional Collaboration
Culture cannot be implemented within individual teams in isolation. The workshop therefore also addressed cross-functional collaboration.
Managers explored how different functions could work together more effectively and how collaboration between teams could become a practical way of reinforcing the new organisational values. As culture is experienced not only through words but also through communication, behaviour and nonverbal cues, managers explored how their own interactions could reinforce the culture they wanted their teams to adopt.
The focus was on making values visible through how people work with one another, not simply through what they say about the culture.
Section 4: The People Manager’s Mindset
The final element focused on growth mindset among people managers.
The premise was simple: managers cannot expect their teams to learn, adapt and grow if they themselves are not operating with the mindset required to support that growth.
The workshop therefore connected culture implementation with the manager’s own approach to learning, change, feedback and team development.
The Outcome
The workshop gave people managers a practical framework for moving from understanding culture to actively shaping it. Rather than treating organisational culture as something communicated from the top, managers were equipped to see themselves as the people responsible for translating it into:
- Team expectations and behaviours
- Everyday ways of working
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Leadership practices
- An environment that encourages learning and growth
The engagement ultimately reinforced an important principle of culture transformation: Organisational culture becomes meaningful when leaders translate it into everyday team behaviour.