Space and structure for working on strategic organizational questions

Company: Makery*
Industry: IT service
Company size: 11-50
Location: Budapest
Project keywords: culture discovery, rebranding, value definition, self-management, teambuilding

*Makery was acquired by TIER Mobility in 2021

The client

Before their acquisition by TIER Mobility in 2021, Makery was a development agency aiming to shape the future through design and technology. Unlike many other agencies, they worked with their partners (not calling them clients on purpose) end-to-end, from vision to execution.

The 3 founders strived to build the company they would’ve loved to work for as employees, consciously creating a great culture and adapting the latest best practices in organizational development, which made it very easy for us to work together because we spoke the same language.

Case study

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The founders of Makery reached out to me when they sensed that they were approaching yet another growth point in their organization. They had recently hired a lot of new people, and they knew that further growth was on their way.

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Goals of our collaboration

Our main goal was to provide the founders with the time, space and facilitated structure to talk about their vision, mission, strategy, redefining their own roles, and other organizational development questions.

Challanges

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Instead of reacting to this growth, this time they had the intention to consciously prepare for the changes they saw coming and be proactive in shaping the organization’s future. They recognized that to be able to sustain this growth, their own roles needed to change from running the day-to-day operations to a more strategic position. They welcomed this shift and wanted to increase the organization’s capacity for self-management to support it.

How to navigate shifting roles in a growing organization?

They also realized that their growing team needed more clearly defined roles and structures than the ones they had at the time, and were looking for ways to put these in place while staying true to the flat hierarchy they had built. They were looking for an expert who could help them think about these big strategic questions alongside their daily tasks and facilitate the process of finding the best solutions.

To put it simply, by hiring me, they forced themselves to put a date in their calendar so they had no excuse for putting these things on the back burner for the sake of something more urgent.

Making time and space for important topics

I knew they wanted to take a helicopter view of the company and organize their thoughts to prepare for the upcoming growth, so I designed our sessions in a way that would allow them to completely disengage from their everyday responsibilities and get into a generative, future-oriented mindset.

Engaging in future oriented thinking

How to prepare the organization for further growth?

Providing structure for strategic conversations

How to tackle strategic organizational questions in a structured way?

Governance meetings

2-3 hours of meetings bi-monthly or monthly between June and December 2020.

These were facilitated conversations where the founders could take a look at the reality of their work, list, prioritize and resolve issues, brainstorm, and have important but not burningly urgent conversations with the help of coaching questions.

I also shared organizational development concepts and frameworks that could support them in this process. For example, we had short sessions about the stages of development in an organization, or about role design.

Insights from another project were channeled into this process

I’ve been simultaneously working on a Culture Day and value definition process with Makery. As preparation for this, I’d conducted short interviews with every member of the organization, and could channel the insights from these interviews into the governance process. Many times, this helped me "represent" the voices of the whole organization in these meetings.

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Project elements

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Impact of our collaboration

A feedback I got from one of the founders was that it was a great experience for them to have time to think about more strategic questions.

The exercises helped to structure their insights about the organization so it was easier to translate them into tangible priorities and action steps.
For example, in a session that remains memorable for me, I came prepared with a very complex and multilayered agenda and a full Mural board, but we never moved past the first exercise. It was a short visualization, and it brought up such a huge topic for them (which hadn’t been on the agenda for that day) that I remember working extremely hard in my head to ask the right questions that would help them figure it out. They managed to reach a conclusion by the end of the session. They shared afterwards that they had been talking about it for months between themselves, so being able to untangle it in our meeting was an important step.

Because I talked to every team member in the company for our Culture Day project, I was able to bring the issues and opinions people voiced to the founders. This helped them see the overlap and the differences between what they saw and what their employees saw happening in the organization. 

As an outcome of the conversations, we had a complete issue mapping and a clear set of organizational priorities. It enabled the team to consciously work on things that needed their attention the most. Once they gained a clear understanding of the strengths and current challenges of the organization, they were able to take direction and resolve issues on their own outside of our meetings.

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