#067 Organizational Change and the Impacts on Culture with Emily McQueen

The Culture Coach

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My guest for this conversation is Emily McQueen. Emily is currently the Vice President of Talent Enablement, Development, and Employee Experience at NEW ROCKET. New Rocket is a global tech company with just over 500 employees. But, Emily has also worked for much larger organizations with as many as 40,000 global employees. Her expertise in this area is decades deep. She was working in the talent transformation space before it was cool or at least before I knew it was cool.

In her day-to-day, Emily partners with executive leadership on things like strategizing and executing performance, learning and development, career planning, talent reviews, promotion cycles, engagement, and company culture plans. She leads a team of more than 25 HR professionals and she helps leaders leverage talent strategies, employee experiences, and organizational culture to enable hyper growth, business transformations, mergers and acquisitions, and turn-arounds.
Here are a few of my takeaways:
1. The purpose of culture is to retain, engage, attract, and be a great place to work, but it has to be directly designed to enable your specific company strategy. A culture should be tailored to your organization.

2. Fit for purpose talent is the talent needed to achieve your business imperatives.

3. If employees aren’t aligned with your business objective ..if they express lack of clarity, low engagement scores, poor company performance this indicates that one or more of your culture touch points aren’t aligned.

4. When shifting your organizational structure or if you’re making large transformational change, you have to shift your culture at the same time. You have to let employees know what expectations you have of them in this new way of doing things.

5. Shifting your vision means redefining your strategy and sometimes changing a core value or two.