The Challenge: Culture at a Crossroads

The challenge for the luxury company and its leadership team was multilayered:

• Decades-old values that employees knew by name but interpreted in vastly different ways
• Multiple, overlapping cultural narratives that were creating confusion rather than cohesion
• A strategic shift that demanded a new cultural identity, one that embraced creativity, ownership, and entrepreneurial thinking
• A large, geographically dispersed workforce operating across multiple markets, each with its own cultural nuances

The organization needed more than a culture refresh. It needed a rigorous, structured, and inclusive process to articulate what its culture truly was, and what it needed to become.

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Enter: Caliber Consulting

To support the redesign, the luxury group brought Caliber Consulting on board (the firm internally termed this project as the ‘Cultural Articulation Project’). Caliber Consulting designed a multi-phase engagement that balanced analytical rigour with genuine organizational inclusion.

The firm’s methodology was grounded in the belief that culture cannot be imposed from the top only, instead, it must be discovered, shaped, and co-created with the people who live it every day.

Phase 1 – Preliminary Discovery and Strategic Assessment
Before engaging with the broader organization, Caliber Consulting’s team conducted an in-depth preliminary assessment to understand the current state of the culture and how it mapped to the group’s evolving strategy.

This included reviewing the organization’s new strategic direction and assessing how existing cultural elements supported or hindered its ambitions, alongside an Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) analysis to establish a baseline for the current and desired culture.

The work also covered a review of existing cultural narratives, values documentation, and internal communications, as well as external benchmarking of leading global ultra-luxury peers to understand how they articulate, embed, and evolve culture to support strategic transformation.

This preparatory phase was critical. It allowed the joint project team to enter the broader discovery phase with a clear point of view on the gaps, risks, and opportunities, and to facilitate conversations with greater depth and precision.

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Phase 2 – In-Depth Organizational Engagement

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To understand the DNA of culture, Caliber Consulting engaged with employees across every level of the organization, from the executive committee to frontline operations teams, in multiple countries across the region.

This workstream combined one-on-one executive interviews to capture leadership intent and strategic priorities with facilitated workshops involving senior leaders, middle management, and frontline employees, each tailored to their specific context and realities.

Surveys and live polls were used to validate qualitative insights at scale, while capability-building sessions helped establish a shared understanding of organizational culture and its role in driving performance and transformation.

The outcome was a rich, multi-dimensional dataset that captured the lived experience of culture across the organization, not just how leadership wanted it to be perceived, but how it was truly experienced at every layer.

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Key Findings: What the Data Revealed

The discovery process led to several significant insights that shaped the direction of the cultural redesign:

Cultural Misalignment
Despite a shared set of values that had been in place for decades, employees across the organization attributed different meanings and interpretations to those values. What should have been a unifying force had become a source of ambiguity.

Multiplicity of Cultural Signals
Over time, the organization had developed multiple, overlapping articulations of its culture through different programmes, initiatives, and leadership tenures. While each was well-intentioned, the cumulative effect was confusion. Employees were receiving mixed signals about what the culture truly stood for.

A Strategy Demanding Cultural Evolution
The group’s bold new strategic direction required a fundamentally different cultural mindset. Where the existing culture rewarded operational excellence and consistency, the new strategy called for creativity, entrepreneurial thinking, and a sense of ownership.

The OCAI analysis confirmed this shift: the organization needed to meaningfully expand its cultural orientation toward a more creative and adaptive mode.

Middle Management as the Cultural Fulcrum
Across all levels of engagement, one finding was particularly re-assuring: middle managers were simultaneously the most critical lever for cultural change. They were the bridge between leadership intent and frontline reality, yet they often lacked the tools, language, and confidence to fulfil that role effectively.

“The most powerful cultural insights do not come from the boardroom. They come from the people closest to the work.”

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Articulating the Culture

Building on the learnings from the discovery phase, Caliber Consulting moved into the articulation phase, translating insights into a clear, structured, and practical cultural framework. The central design question was: ‘What will serve as the cultural currency of this organization?’

After careful consideration, the consultants identified behaviours as the primary cultural currency. Behaviours are observable, measurable, and tangible. They are the most direct expression of what a culture actually looks like, not in aspiration, but in practice. The framework was drawn from three steps:

• The organization’s existing values were used as the foundational anchor, preserving the heritage and identity that employees had long associated with the group
• A set of Cultural Principles was developed to sit above the behaviours, providing the guiding logic that connected the values to the day-to-day realities of the business
• The behaviours themselves were then identified and refined based on their business impact, cultural authenticity, and practical ease of implementation

The result was a coherent, layered framework with Values at the foundation; Principles as the bridge; and Behaviours as the daily expression of both.

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Making Culture Stick

As with any cultural transformation, defining the culture is only the beginning – the more critical challenge lies in embedding it across the organization and into the day-to-day behaviours of its people. To realize this objective, Caliber Consulting applied its 3-pillar framework for cultural embedment.

Pillar 1 – The Software of the Organization
Culture is carried by people, rituals, and symbols, among other factors. Caliber Consulting worked to identify and activate the informal elements of organizational life that reinforce the desired culture, including leadership role modelling, team rituals, storytelling practices, and symbolic signals that communicate what the organization truly values.

Pillar 2 – The Hardware of the Organization
Culture must be supported by systems. Caliber Consulting advised assessing the degree to which the organization’s formal structures, including policies, processes, performance management frameworks, and organizational design, were aligned with the desired cultural direction.

Pillar 3 – Middle Managers as Cultural Ambassadors
Given the findings from the discovery phase, the project team placed particular emphasis on equipping middle managers to own and champion the culture within their teams. Serving as the bridge between higher and lower levels of the organization, middle managers are uniquely positioned to translate cultural intent into daily reality.

Supporting all three pillars was a communication strategy built around storytelling, helping ensure the cultural narrative was not just defined by leadership, but genuinely understood and embraced across the organization.

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The Outcome: Culture Made Tangible

The cultural redesign and transformation project delivered a suite of practical, interconnected outputs that gave the global luxury business a clear and actionable path forward.

These included:

• A co-created set of Cultural Principles, developed in partnership with employees across all levels of the organization, ensuring broad ownership and relevance
• A clearly defined set of Cultural Behaviours, specific, observable, and aligned to the group’s strategic direction, that serve as the daily currency of the culture
• A shared understanding of the organization’s values, and a common language for how those values are expressed in practice
• A Cultural Behavioural Playbook, a practical guide that any employee, at any level, can use to understand the cultural framework and begin implementing it in their day-to-day work
• A set of quick wins and immediate actions to enable employees to start living the culture from day one
• A powerful cultural signal: that the voices of employees at every level matter, and that culture is everyone’s responsibility

Commenting on the project and the firm’s involvement, Rani Salman, Managing Partner at Caliber Consulting, said: “Culture does not change through announcements. It changes through consistent action, enabled by the right systems and championed by the right people. We are delighted to have helped this iconic business redesign its culture and turn it into a strategic asset for the future.”

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