Empowering Employees to Deliver Cultural Change

On a recent Called to Coach, we spoke with guest Fiona Glendinning.

Fiona Glendinning is the Chief Experience Officer at MinterEllison, an international law firm headquartered in Australia. Fiona designed and implemented an employee program called Empower within MinterEllison that uses strengths to help employees deliver a better client experience and to generate organizational cultural change.

Empower Program video

• Empower Briefing Session
• Partner Development
• Partner Session
• Team Strengths Session
• Team Session
• Team Launch and Empower in Practice
• Results and the Journey Continue

How do you know what the baseline is to kick off a program like this?

• Fiona -- We did a lot of really robust client listening.
  • Hired outside consultant
  • Develop that talent internally to be able to continue the feedback system.
• We also did a lot of internal listening

Defining the best internally

• It is not a one-size-fits-all.
• Empower creates a framework to have a discussion at an individual level around skills, goals, and therefore define what the "best" looks like.
• Encourage employees to go out to engage with clients so that they aren't making assumptions about the needs of the clients.
• Employees can say "I know I have strengths in these areas, so how can I use them with my clients?"

What are the disruptions that came out of Empower?

• A lot around efficiencies
• A lot around collaboration
• A lot around personal development
  • We've been really excited to see how we look at doing work differently.
  • What insights have you gained about yourself?
  • We want to make sure this is a real-time change exercise

Three areas of innovation:

• Innovation in Mindset
• Innovation in Behavior
• Innovation in Activity

Diversity

• Internally -- Diversity among the team brings value to the team
• To our clients -- We're presenting our services through diversity so that it's not a one solution to a problem, but lots of different approaches.
• Resilience and confidence
  • Change is hard
  • Strengths gives confidence

Empower Program Sprints (3 months/90-minute sessions) w/ refreshers

• Empower Briefing Session
  • Functional teams
  • Teams select where they have the most impact
• Partner Development
  • LSI -- strictly developmental tool
  • Strengths gives the platform to build out the "blue" of LSI
• Partner Session
  • We want focused disruption
  • capability/growth/innovation
• Team Strengths Session
  • Team Strengths Map
  • How do we use strengths more actively across the team?
• Team Session
• Team Launch and Empower in Practice
• Results and the Journey Continue

Innovation Awards

• Financial Times

What do you think is the real key to translating great ideas into results?

Simplicity

• Can't be divorced from what is being done in the business day-to-day.

Fiona Glendinning's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are Futuristic, Strategic, Significance, Includer and Ideation.

Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach Luke Ramsay contributed to this post.