Management Team Effectiveness
Your culture got you here. Now it has to grow with you.
Every scale-up reaches a point where its culture has to change shape. What made you fast and close-knit at 30 people makes accountability and follow-through inconsistent at 100+. Cultural Building is work with your wider team or whole organisation, built around the specific shift your company has to make, with your management team in the lead.
Examples of cultural shifts we often encounter
Shifts most scale-ups have to make on the way to their next phase. None of them mean the current culture is wrong: it was just built for a smaller company. What makes these shifts difficult is that they touch what people are proud of: the closeness, the loyalty, the product, the way things have always been done. Building new cultural patterns means letting go of what’s comfortable, and deliberately creating new habits and standards.
The shift:
From warm to warm and demanding.
Why it’s difficult:
In the early days, everyone was close and mistakes were forgiven. Now that you scaled, calling out a colleague who isn’t delivering is still difficult. So nobody does it, and performance quietly deteriorates.
The shift:
From founder-led to management-team-led.
Why it’s difficult:
The founders have to stop making every call, even though that is what made the company work. And the other leaders have to start making those calls themselves, which they are often not used to, and not always trusted to do.
The shift:
From an R&D culture to one that makes room for commercial focus, with strong accountability for results.
Why it’s difficult:
When a company’s identity is built around its product or technology, commercial focus can feel like giving up what it stands for. This is not a change in strategy but a change in identity, and it asks for a radically different culture: different heroes, different questions, different ways of deciding what matters.
How it works
A culture fit for growth, led from the top and lived across the company
Step 1
Diagnosis
We start with a Growth Assessment, so we know which shift matters most and where the culture is already strong.
Step 2
Design with the Management Team
Your management team leads the change. We design the trajectory with them and prepare them to carry it.
Step 3
Working days with the organisation
Facilitated days with the wider team or the whole company, built around your cultural transformation.
Step 4
New behaviours and rituals
Behaviours and rituals that make accountability and reliability part of how the company runs, long after we leave.
Culture work usually runs alongside Management Team Effectiveness, so the management team changes first and leads the rest.
Results
A culture that is warm and demanding: people hold each other to account, without losing the closeness that made you special.
Feedback that is direct and kind, so problems surface while they are still small.
Reliability as the basis of trust: people do what they say, and others can build on it.
Values that guide real decisions: who you hire, what you reward and what you say no to.
Teams that pull towards the same priorities, across functions, instead of defending their own.
A culture that can absorb rapid growth: new people quickly learn how things work here.
Format
Starts with a Growth Assessment, followed by design sessions with the management team.
Working days with teams or the whole company every 4-6 weeks.
Usually combined with Management Team Effectiveness, so the management team changes first and leads the rest.
Proposal based on the size of your organisation and the length of the trajectory; determined by Growth Assessment outcomes.
Who you’ll work with
Senior practitioners, each with a different lens on the same room.
Anna Dia Adriani
Experienced COO · Executive Coach · Corporate Anthropologist
Experienced scale-up leader who has been in your shoes. Brings a systemic lens: the patterns between people and the unwritten rules of how a company and team functions.
Laurie Kemp
Psychotherapist · Entrepreneur · Facilitator
A trained psychotherapist with a decade designing leadership programs for Founders, MTs and scale-ups. Sees the behavioural patterns limiting a team before leaders can name them themselves.
Neena Madhok
Executive Coach & Facilitator • ICF Master Certified Coach
Over a decade of startup and scale-up experience and a background in investment banking. Done 4,000+ coaching hours and nearly 1,000 workshops on team and group dynamics.
Learn more about the team.
Get started
Is your team ready for what’s next?
Each trajectory starts with a Growth Assessment, so we work on the right things from day one.