Transforming organisational culture and leadership effectiveness

Client profile

Snowy Hydro Ltd operates the Snowy Mountains Scheme, an integrated water and hydroelectric power project located in Australia’s Southern Alps. It provides renewable energy and energy-related products and manages critical water flows. It is also involved in implementing a range of environmental and community initiatives.

The issues

As the organisation emerged from a semi – government business, it needed to shed its ‘silo thinking’ and embrace a culture of innovation where proactive behaviour was encouraged. Although senior leaders had a clear vision of the organisation, the larger workforce of 400 employees did not share or have a sound understanding of the direction of the business.

The Pacific Institute approach

• An ‘inside-out’ approach, guiding individuals across the entire organisation through a process of personal discovery and goal alignment. We then helped them to apply similar principles to their own leadership and organisational development.
• Building vision and belief within the leadership team and ensuring they could commit to, as well as lead, culture change.
• Measuring current and desired culture to articulate what individuals needed to do, in order to support the new culture.

How did The Pacific Institute help enhance leadership effectiveness and transform culture?

We worked closely with our client to help identify the existing culture and the preferred culture and how it linked to organisational strategy, leadership effectiveness and performance.
We assisted the senior management group to articulate the challenges, priorities and solutions, generating a sense of unity and enthusiasm for the changes. We implemented 360 degree feedback to gain self awareness about how their leadership style was affecting culture and what could be done to improve it.

The client subsequently rolled these tools out to all employees. The aim was to help empower and support work teams by identifying and reducing barriers to high performance. We helped foster a “Team Snowy” ethos by providing an environment for sharing ideas, learning to build self – efficacy and accountability towards achieving a shared organisational vision.

Delivering measurable benefits: partnering with The Pacific Institute was the right choice

- A measurable cultural index improvement of 42% within the first 18 months, as benchmarked against the Human Synergistics international database.
- A noticeable, desirable shift in culture and positive indicators of the impact leaders had over others, over a 2 year period; tracked via an organisational culture survey to evaluate how the vision was communicated.