Series 5, Episode 4 - "Curiosity, Reflection and Kindness." Sophy Norris in conversation with Birthe Mester, Organisational Culture Expert and Founder of Culture Dividend

In this week's Episode, our host Sophy Norris speaks to Birthe Mester, board advisor and award-winning organisational development and culture change expert. She is also a thought leader, facilitator, conference speaker, accredited mediator and coach with a 30-year cross sector track record and deep expertise in transforming performance, engagement and culture of complex global organisations.

As with so many dangerous women, Birthe’s career has been expansive. Before launching her current business Culture Dividend, she was a Senior leader at Deutsche Bank for 15 years, working closely with the board and leadership team on the employee effectiveness agenda. Responsible for embedding significant enterprise wide behavioural and culture change in a sustainable manner and in line with strategic and commercial objectives as well as corporate values.

We have talked on this podcast before about riding the transformation wave, and how exhausting battling every wave can be, finding a way to skim across the crests seems to be the trick, Culture change is part of our everyday lives now, whether it is complex, matrixed, enterprise organisations, or the solo worker finding a fresh path and everything in between, and Birthe and Sophy explore this across their conversation.

In this Episode we cover: 

• How dangerousness in the eye of the beholder
• Not pleasing everyone all the time, the power of difficult questions and the importance of inconvenient truths 
• Knowledge is power, but so is experience 
• Why businesses, like leopards, don't change their spots; the DNA is always there. But it is possible to adapt DNA to modern thinking 
• Meeting people where they are; listen; channel everyday behaviours to push change 
• If you want to survive as an organisation, diversity of thought is key 
• Culture is linked to performance, and performance is critical 
• Businesses that engender trust have more accountable and more collaborative employees
• Increading the size of the pie is more important than increasing the slice 
• Think penguins and flamingos - corporate change is not one size fits all 

Links: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/birthemester/

culture-dividend.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophy-norris/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-alligator-pi-agency/

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kayhneman

Brian Eno - Oblique Strategies