Transforming from a telco to a techco required a deep commitment to inspiring engagement throughout the company. EVP and Chief Revenue Officer Ashley Haynes-Gaspar discusses partnering with BCG to navigate this change and the extraordinary results Lumen has already seen.
Our Approach to Culture and Change Management
Three out of four large-scale transformations fail to meet their objectives. But there are ways to flip the odds: leadership commitment, a focus on culture, executional excellence, and inspiring and supporting people amid change. Our approach to organizational culture and change management combines all of these elements.
1. Desired Culture
How you adapt, innovate, collaborate, and build a diverse and inclusive workplace: culture drives it all. We help create a high-performance culture that embraces and fuels always-on transformation. It starts with building momentum for culture change by quickly launching low-lift “no regret” practices (like recognizing employees for transformation-positive behaviors). That’s followed by articulating the unique set of cultural traits that support business strategy, activating them through leader and organization-wide practices, and embedding the culture and change in organization structures, processes, and policies.
2. Leader Enablement
Successful transformations share one characteristic: leaders who lead with their head, heart, and hands. This means envisioning the future and aligning on priorities (the head), inspiring and empowering people (the heart), and executing and innovating with agility (the hands). While most transformations address the head and the hands, relatively few focus on the heart. Yet in our experience, engaging all three translates to a 96% chance of sustained transformation success. So a big part of our work is creating agents of change: leaders who make a compelling case for change, model new behaviors, communicate with empathy, and demonstrate care amid transformation.
3. People Engagement
Transformations are disruptive: strategy changes, operations change, processes change. And these successive waves of change have a profound impact on an organization’s people. We take a human-centric approach to change management consulting because when people thrive, organizations thrive. This means making sure that employees feel seen and supported, that they understand what is happening and why, that they are motivated by the vision, and enabled to contribute and deliver. Through scientifically-backed engagement and communications tactics, we help companies identify what sparks and what hinders transformation—and activate the most important enabler of them all: people.
4. Executional Certainty
Change programs have many interconnecting components: new technologies, new priorities, new capabilities, new ways of working. Getting everything in sync—and ensuring sustainable value delivery--requires dedicated, hands-on management of the overall effort. We help organizations create, and empower, a transformation office—a hub for tracking progress, sparking new behaviors, and adjusting course when necessary. We bring adaptive, end-to-end program management models and strong governance to every engagement, helping clients keep change on track—and on point.
Our Impact on Culture and Change Management
We partner with organizations across the private and public sectors to spark the behaviors and mindset that turn change into value. Here’s some of our work in culture and change.
As part of a 12-week transformation, BCG worked with a global pharmaceutical company to help leaders articulate the case for change and foster clear communication between management and the workforce. This laid the foundation for a transformation that yielded $500 million in cost reduction, an earnings growth rate jump from 15% to 20%, and a rise in market value of $20 billion.
To accelerate a transformation for a leading brewery group, we helped leaders craft a shared
purpose, articulate that purpose to employees, and involve people at all levels of the organization in changing organizational culture. This fueled a transformation that, over seven years, helped the company’s share price double, earnings per share rise 147%, and cash returns more than quadruple.
BCG worked with a South American telco to improve its procurement program by successfully investing in organizational culture change. Our change management consultants helped leaders engage staff throughout the process, communicate the purpose, and provide support through upskilling. The effort saw the company achieve $283 million in savings by creating a more adaptive procurement program.
Video
April 22, 2025
Our Culture and Change Management Tools and Solutions
BCG’s culture and change experts are supported by an array of proprietary solutions: cutting-edge applications of AI, deep learning, and advanced analytics that ensure lasting performance improvements. Here’s some of our toolkit.
OrgVantage
A holistic diagnostic, this tool assesses organizational effectiveness and helps companies zero in on advantages that can boost performance and engagement.
OrgVantage
Transformation Academy
This online and live learning program is tailored for each client and uses real case studies to ensure transformation best practices.
Transformation Academy
KEY Impact Management by BCG X
KEY Impact Management is a one-stop-shop for program management, managing complexity on every phase of a transformation.
KEY Impact Management by BCG X
Momentum Meter
Research has found that people’s attitude toward change is influenced by two factors. The first is confidence, or individuals’ belief in their ability to succeed. The second is mental capacity, or their bandwidth to complete complex tasks. These factors shift over time—often rapidly—and are affected by what is happening in their work life and personal life. Our meter is a weekly pulse check, supported by powerful analytics, that examines employee sentiment during periods of change and that provides insights that spark timely and precise interventions.
Culture Diagnostic
Culture can make or break a transformation. Our diagnostic tool helps organizations get the lay of the land—and zero in on the behaviors and beliefs that foster growth and value—before changing organizational culture.
Ready, Willing, Able
Employees are the lifeblood of transformation, which makes it crucial to know their sentiment towards change. This survey helps companies understand how ready, willing, and able their workforce is to adapt successfully.
Book
Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI
Personalization presents a $2 trillion opportunity, and BCG's new book provides a playbook—including essential change management strategies—to help you capture your share of this personalization prize.
Our Latest Insights on Culture and Change Management
Article
January 26, 2024
Transformations are critical to building competitive advantage and delivering shareholder value. They are most successful when managed through a transformation office.
Article
August 23, 2023
Companies committed to becoming sustainable find that it can be a struggle to marshal their organization and people behind that goal.
Article
January 26, 2023
Analyzing massive data sets in real time, generating unbiased insights, enabling prompt course correction: an AI-based approach is powering up—and radically transforming—initiative management.
Meet Our Culture and Change Management Consulting Team
BCG’s culture and change management consultants come from different regions and different backgrounds, but they’re guided by a shared belief: the best transformations don’t just improve processes, they create an environment for sustained success. Here’s some of our team.
