Katzenbach Partners Profile, Pt. 2: How Collaboration Helped the Company and its Clients Grow
Just as young consultants are drawn to Katzenbach Partners by the promise of a larger and more fluid role, big-name clients like Aetna and Pfizer come to the firm knowing that they too will be joining forces to attack the challenge at hand.
"We have a lot of respect for what these firms know already," Katzenbach Partners principal Zia Khan says. "If you're Fortune 500, there are a lot of good ideas and approaches in the company and we try to leverage those ideas."
Khan explains that Katzenbach Partners is focused on learning from its clients as much as they learn from the consultancy, creating a collaborative effort and empowering its client to facilitate change rather than simply producing a report and seven steps to improvement.
Katzenbach Partners tries to make it safe to take risks with clients in order to create breakthroughs in organizational performance. Khan says that the first step is to make sure they're talking with the client and engaging them, even with imperfect ideas, so they are collaborating with them rather than providing authoritative, but recycled, plans of action.
"With one client, a retailer, we didn't know what we were doing for first two weeks because they couldn't really articulate where the challenges were," says Khan. "So we just chatted with them for weeks and came up with this idea to create a story about how retail associates create a compelling experience, told through a cartoon."
Khan admits that there was some fear about this, given that they were dealing with a new client. But in the end, they decided to go ahead with it despite the risk.
"They just loved it," Khan says. "But even if they hated it and fired us it still would have been the right way to go."
The fruit of all this collaboration and empowerment is a full body of work in innovative principles and approaches. Khan and Katzenbach are currently working on a book about the idea of an informal organization that exists below the company's org chart and facilitates problem solving and inter-team communication.
Khan is also studying the idea of having fun at work creating value to the business.
"There's actually something to organizations that are really good at customer service having fun as an explicit value," Khan says. "Just like there's something about fun that's really personal, customer service is also very personal." Khan and his team have found that studying the ways in which these two pursuits can overlap is already yielding some interesting results.
The team is looking at decision-making, framing decisions properly, and how and when decisions stick. They are also focusing on how physical space impacts collaboration and the possibility of designing offices like small towns with different types of spaces meant to enable different types of work. The idea being that rather than building homogenuous cube farms or a series of offices around a conference room, the office would have a variety of places that would act like front porches, town squares and other unique functional spaces in a town.
Elsewhere within Katzenbach Partners, some colleagues are working on the question of how to sustain the right kind of tension in the organization and allow teams to have "fights" in the right way. Others are doing a project modeled after the British documentary 7 Up, where they are tracking the careers of managers in China by interviewing them at set intervals in their careers.
Khan says that there are some obvious advantages to both consultants and clients working with larger, more authoritative multinational strategy firms, but he attributes Katzenbach's high level of customer respect, impressive employee satisfaction and diversity to the firm's willingness to pay as much attention to improving its collaboration as it does improving that of its clients.