Often the main brake on a company's development is its established corporate culture: patterns of behavior and interaction that formed under the previous business model and old priorities. You cannot change them with slogans and presentations. What works is something else — regular management practices built into every manager's calendar.
What gets in the way
There are usually several reasons: the company culture lacks a high enough level of collective responsibility and teamwork; some managers lack the leadership potential to build collaboration; there is not enough of a culture of process management. For rank-and-file staff to support the changes, managers' leadership potential needs to be developed deliberately — as a tool for managing culture and engagement.
The “Development” practice
Managers regularly analyze how their working time is structured — how much of it goes to developing their direct reports, the team and the culture. They join a leaders' support group where they share achievements, ask for help and exchange insights. They work in pairs and report to each other on their plans, finding ways together to overcome barriers and their own resistance.
The “1:1” practice
One-on-one meetings where the manager gives developmental feedback and discusses the employee's development plan for the next period. A separate conversation is about strengths: where the employee's talent lies and which role in the team is uniquely theirs.
The “Team” practice
- Daily status meetings — syncing activity and setting the working rhythm.
- A weekly retrospective — lessons from the past week and an improvement plan.
- Monthly re-contracting — what works, what doesn't, what to change.
- A quarterly meeting of the whole team on strategic goals.
- Every 3–6 months — collecting the team's feedback on the management and leadership style (feed-forward).
Where the system comes in
Practices only stay alive if someone plans them, reminds people about them and sees that they actually happen. We build such a module on the TopHR platform around the client's specific methodology: a schedule of practices, tasks for managers, recording that they took place, and coverage reporting. The methodology is set by the company or its expert partner in management systems; the automation is on us.
What the company gets
- Leadership practices as a working tool for shaping the target culture rather than a set of declarations.
- Values built into management: responsibility, teamwork, innovation, customer focus.
- Strategic goals put into operation through new patterns of team management and interaction between departments.
