Organizational Services

Deploying its acclaimed and proprietary Immunity to Change™ approach, Minds at Work ® helps organizations around the world to understand and overcome the fundamental, yet often invisible, forces that foil progress on individual and collective goals critical to success. Working with units as small as a leadership team and as large as a company’s whole culture, our Organizational Practice has, for many years, served private- and public-sector organizations of all sizes, all over the world. Please read some of our case studies below, or learn more about how your organization can utilize the Immunity to Change™ approach online by clicking here

Imagine creating a genuine step-change in the capabilities of your people.

What difference would that make:
For the effectiveness of your teams?
For the impact of your culture?
For the distinctiveness of your organization’s performance?

Every engagement is custom-designed in collaboration with our client’s senior members.

Do you need your whole organization to think and act differently?

Cultural Transformation

The Immunity to Change approach puts a “change-gene” into your organization’s DNA, making it a powerful method for at-scale transformation. It enables people throughout your organization to act in alignment with the core values around how you want the business to change.
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The leaders of a 100,000-employee utility in Europe determined that the command-and-control culture they installed to successfully turn around the company in crisis will not serve the company well for its next chapter.  Minds at Work is providing a key component of its efforts to create a more collaborative, creative, and risk-taking culture. Through a mix of face-to-face and scalable designs enabled by the new technologies, each person in the organization, supported by his or her intact team, is using Immunity to Change™ practices to make significant progress on a personal-improvement goal that can most contribute to the cultural shift. Early metrics indicate the initiative is gaining significant traction.
Are your “people-development” programs truly developing anyone? Are they adding a few “apps” or “files” to people’s personal “operating systems” or promoting a genuine upgrade in the “operating system” itself?

Leadership Development Programs

Growing and retaining top talent is essential for high performing organizations. Too often, this is an unfulfilled aspiration, despite all the efforts and resources. Most organizations today are stuck in 20th century learning models that send people away to ‘leadership development programs,’ ‘training seminars,’ and the like; and hope their people will somehow transfer, to their worksite, experiences gained during a brief break offsite. Our leadership development program brings continuous learning and capability development into the ongoing activities of the work-week.
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Serving hundreds of senior partners in an international strategy consulting firm, Minds at Work, over a period of ten years, has designed and delivered best-in-show leadership development programming, based on the latest theory and practice in adult development (much of it conducted by MAW’s principals). Peer feedback is often along the lines of, “Who captured Bill and is now occupying his body?”; “These are changes I would never have imagined possible for this person!”
Is your leadership team truly a “leadership team” or more “a collection of leaders”? Do you need your team to be a more synchronized engine, powering the organization where it needs to go?

Overcoming a Team’s Immunity to Change

Teams, just like individuals, can be immune to change. They commit to improvements they know they need to make in order to increase their effectiveness, and yet they act contrary to those intentions. It can be tempting to explain this gap as resistance to change, or more cynically that the team never truly intended to change. A more likely conclusion, however, is that the team is unaware of what we call their “counter commitments,” which are producing the behaviors that undermine their aspirations. Once the team recognizes this invisible force, they can begin to unleash their true potential.
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Over two years, Minds at Work helped the senior team of a state government’s large child-welfare division to move from a siloed “team of leaders” to a genuinely co-operating “leadership team.” “I was, frankly, at a standstill with this team,” the Commissioner says, “before we began this work. Now we are a single unit, a going concern.”
Are you looking to build your company’s internal capabilities to use Immunity-to-Change practices?

Building In-House Capabilities

Growing internal organizational capabilities is a cost-effective means to bring the Immunity to Change approach to your organization, at whatever level is needed—individual, team or organization-wide.
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Minds at Work has been asked:

By the OD department of a pharmaceutical company to train its members to integrate ITC practices into their change-management work.

By the HR department of a phone company to train its members to integrate ITC practices into their talent-development work.

By the Learning department of a silicon-valley company to train its members to integrate ITC practices into their internal learning offerings for their executives and engineers.

By an international media company to equip 500 line leaders to integrate ITC  practices into their teams.

By professional services firms (e.g., a Big Four accounting firm and an international executive search firm) to equip their senior members to use ITC  practices with their clients.

How could you make your organization the most powerful incubator in your sector to ensure that all of your people get support for their growth every day? How do you become, not just a “great place to work,” but a “great place to grow”?

Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization™ (DDO)

Our latest endeavor, drawing on decades of research and consulting, is to work with organizations to help them turn employee struggles into growth opportunities that create a new kind of competitive advantage. We enable organizations to unlock the advantages of being a great place to grow for everyone—in a way that’s energizing and sustainable.

Our research is revealing the ways that uniquely developmental cultures work. Our practice is about making more of such cultures possible. Our sister firm, Way to Grow Inc., is a work in progress incubator for our mission and ourselves.

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Partnering with  Way to Grow Inc. www.waytogrowinc.com, Minds at Work is helping the leadership team of a global, privately-owned “infant gear” company to become a Deliberately Developmental Team, as a first phase toward becoming a DDO.
 

Immunity to Change

Read how the Immunity to Change approach has helped a wide array of businesses and non-profit organizations–including an international strategy consulting firm, hospitals, financial institutions, school systems and universities, a top pharmaceutical company, a European railway, a state’s Child Welfare office, and the U.S. Forest Service–achieve vital goals and overcome stubborn organizational challenges.

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