Mass Transit Organization: Leadership Development

THE NEED

The leadership at a public mass transit organization with over 125 years of history recognized that with a well-established organizational heritage also comes deeply embedded patterns and approaches to problem-solving and working. Agency leadership moved to revisit and, if necessary, redefine the organization’s vision and values. Clarifying and possibly updating the vision and values for this 45,000-employee agency meant closely assessing operations and leadership structures to ensure sustainable alignment that would see the organization through many more years to come.

THE INTERVENTION

gothamCulture was engaged to support the agency leadership over the course of a three-year project, focused on providing leadership across the organization with a deep understanding of its current culture and the tools to begin creating sustainable, organization-wide change.

Work began with the design and facilitation of team alignment processes, starting with the senior executive team and working downward through the organization. The senior leadership were tasked with revising the agency’s vision and value-set through several work sessions, and then gothamCulture provided support with the creation and deployment of over 20 two-day alignment and information workshops which aided leadership teams with identification and clarification of their roles in the evolution of the organization.

These workshops also served to prep agency leaders for the important step of actively communicating this information across the organization. Through engaging their teams in productive dialogue about changes and updates, leaders played a key role in ensuring all personnel had the opportunity to clarify and understand their investment in bringing the refined vision and operational improvements to fruition.

In this early work, gothamCulture’s partnership with senior leadership focused on modifying existing systems and processes within the organization to better support and reinforce the culture change goals over the long term.

THE IMPACT

The work moved the public mass transit agency toward a common understanding of a revised vision and value-set while prioritizing universal employee understanding and engagement with the project and goals.

The organization continues to focus on sustainable change by assessing and evolving systems and procedures throughout, while gothamCulture continues to support additional work aimed at aligning those systems and processes to the vision and values