Creating a culture of collaboration with Unilever

Unilever’s Insight Team needed better collaborate with their primary internal customer – Marketing – to deliver greater business impact. Sheppard Moscow was engaged to help the team cocreate an environment where leaders, senior managers and colleagues can work with a feeling of mutual trust and respect and safely challenge each other to drive change for the good of the organisation.

Focus

There was no ‘one size fits all’ approach to strategic business partnering, so the starting point was to understand the specific organisational context in which we were working. We, therefore, conducted a diagnosis process with senior managers, the leadership team and marketing colleagues. As a result, five key themes emerged:

1. The need for greater commercial mindset and business acumen
2. The importance of building robust relationships
3. A mindset and behavioural capability that created a willingness to challenge
4. The desire to identify Insights that would create business opportunities
5. A sense of accountability for creating change on the back of insights, not just delivering research

These themes formed the backbone of the Strategic Business Partnering intervention.

Action

For real culture change, the whole function needed to be included in this development, and it had to be led from the top – this wasn’t an intervention for a discrete population. Therefore we started with an engagement and launch event for the senior management population. Then we ran two programmes:

• A short single-module programme for senior managers focused on mindset and behaviour change, and leading staff through the change.
• A more comprehensive, two-module programme for the wider population focusing on development around the five key themes.