European Business School

Bath Consultancy Group worked with a European business school that needed to move from arms length manager training and development to a closer more integrated relationship with key leading companies, thus ensuring repeat business and being able to deliver more senior and more strategic development.

The problem was the existence of a very individualistic culture in the company and the old psychological contract, which was based on “We’ll get bums on seats and you leave us alone. As a result they were not able to develop collective relationships with other faculty members and pass on knowledge about client needs etc. However, working with the whole faculty proved very difficult - although they acknowledged the problem they found it difficult to change their behaviour. This faculty-wide culture also acted as a dead-weight on the small number of people who wanted the change to happen.

BCG helped them set-up a Business Development Group which we isolated from the rest of the faculty for a period of months. They developed their own internal culture, which was highly collaborative and highly client-centred. This was enormously successful for the school and for the individuals. Over a period of time we were then able to mainstream this work and bring the rest of the faculty along with it resulting in improved business performance and strengthened client relationships.

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