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Employee Surveys and Research - Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness - Towers Perrin-ISR

Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness

Aligning leadership and culture to achieve results

No organization stands still today. To achieve desired business outcomes, senior leadership needs to align itself with your organization’s business strategy and culture — developing a shared view of what the strategy means, how the culture needs to evolve to support that strategy and what day-to-day decisions will make it possible.

Above all, your organization needs to understand the impact of changing strategies on employee engagement and performance, and have a clear plan to manage that change.

Our groundbreaking research and work in organizational effectiveness — both with leadership teams and in connecting strategy and culture — allow us to understand the key cultural characteristics required to successfully execute specific business strategies. Our unique set of tools will help your leaders evaluate their shared vision, plus determine gaps and how to address them.

Our work helps you do the following

  • Develop leadership capability and ensure alignment in the corporate vision.
  • Align your culture with your strategic priorities to enhance your ability to achieve those goals.
  • Gain the context for understanding how your quantitative results compare with others in your industry globally, or within your own country.
  • Pinpoint obstacles and map out actions required to move the organization forward.

Our offerings include

  • Leadership Effectiveness Studies and Programs: Measure how perceptions of the "critical few" impact leadership's effectiveness and organizational performance.
  • Cultural Alignment Tool: Evaluate how well your current and desired organizational cultures correlate with your strategic priorities.
  • Customer Engagement Studies and Programs: Build a comprehensive picture of how your employee behavior supports successful customer relationships.
  • Innovation Culture Studies and Programs: Evaluate your organization's capabilities, innovation skills and readiness to succeed in the marketplace.
  • Organizational Ethics Audit: Identify ethical behavior across the organization, identify problem areas, and map the interventions needed to reduce risk.
  • An unmatched database of global norms based on geography, industry, functional area, level of corporate financial performance and demographic groups.

Closing the Leadership Gap

Towers Perrin research consistently shows that leadership is a top driver of employee engagement — not only across virtually all the countries we study, but also across all economic cycles. Unfortunately, our research also shows that employees continue to find their leaders' behavior and performance wanting in a number of key areas that are becoming more important in today's climate. These include empathy, visibility, vision, authenticity and frequent and honest communication, to name just a few. Only 10% of employees in Towers Perrin's 2007-2008 Global Workforce Study agreed that their organization’s senior leaders treated them as vital corporate assets. Far more reported their leaders act as if employees don't matter. This gap between leadership’s words and actions continues to affect individual and organizational performance in ways both obvious and subtle.

Understanding what employees think, feel and care about is the critical starting point in determining how to close a leadership say/do gap. Our knowledge of employee attitudes, combined with our sophisticated analytic capabilities and HR domain expertise, ensures that we can derive the insights that matter in shaping the kind of leadership behavior that drives high engagement and performance on a sustained basis.