The Culture that Binds Us: Understanding Leaders’ Needs at a Professional Services Organization

Abstract Information: Previous studies have shown that commitment and trust are strongly linked to important outcomes for organizations and individuals (e.g., performance and engagement), but the research has not yet clearly explored the sense of collective commitment and trust among the leaders of an organization. For organizations seeking to maintain or strengthen their leadership culture, the lack of adequate measurement tools limits the ability to understand needs, design programming, and take appropriate action. At our organization, we recognized a failure to adequately capture the unique talent experience of leaders and more specifically, these culture-related concepts of collective trust and commitment that bind leaders to each other. As described in this paper, we sought to identify, define, and measure the unique elements of our leadership culture that contribute to an overall talent experience unique to employees at a leadership level in our organization. This process included the creation of definitions and new quantitative measures. The goal was to understand needs and create actions to maintain and strengthen the unique culture and experience leaders have at our firm and in the future, test the effectiveness of interventions in this area. We discuss three areas of learning from the process. First, we explain the foundations of the survey tool we ultimately created, exploring how we drew upon literature and internal documentation to target our measurement. Second, we discuss the methodological and practical challenges of developing and validating relevant survey items in a large, complex organization. Finally, we share the applications and implications of the measure for program evaluation and organizational development at our firm. The paper offers insights and lessons learned for evaluators and practitioners who are interested in developing and using similar measures at their own organizations.