Company Culture Transformation
Context
Shearman & Sterling is a multination law firm based in New York City. They have over 850 attorneys from 80 different countries, speaking 60 different languages, based in 23 different offices.
Challenge
They wanted an organisation who could support them in their vision of transforming the whole culture of the law firm.
The culture was very top down, and they wanted to engage and upskill their partners to role-model a feedback culture.
The Solution
Alchemist, together with Shearman & Sterling, created a series of half day feedback programmes for the core staff. This was complimented by a series of one-to-one coaching sessions for the partners.
Partners worked with executive coaches to explore specific scenarios in which they had to deliver feedback. Importantly they also worked together to re-evaluate their working relationship with other staff.
Out of the ten partners worked with, eight were taken through as champions of the initiative. The remaining two were identified as detractors and split off into a separate learning track.
The impact
Alchemist’s programme was deployed to ten partners across the New York Offices. Eight of the partners advocated for the programmes across multiple business functions and legal streams.
Business Admin became the first pilot group to experience a half-day programme. And every participant requested and received additional programme experience to improve skill level in providing feedback upwards.
