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Building a Resilient Culture: Pact’s Recent Journey with Edge
Pact is a forty year old, large international development 
organization, with a global workforce spread across nearly thirty countries. When I joined eighteen months ago as a new CEO, the organization was fragmented, and was facing several critical challenges.
Pact’s pace of growth outstripped its ability to support the organization operationally, and as a result, serious questions were raised by its key client about its ability to provide effective stewardship and oversight. It had under invested for years in the key support functions, especially HR and talent management, and all its technical expertise was shallow and project based. It had an unclear vision and mission, and no organizational goals. Senior leadership was fragmented, under qualified and focused defending their own interests and rather than fostering collaboration and promoting talent. Most critically, the organization self-characterized its culture as passive – defensive, and there were few incentives or pathways to change. And finally, to top it all off, I was inexperienced in the role and function of a CEO, having never done it before.
One of my top objectives for the organization was to make Pact a healthy, productive and rewarding place to work; a place that people feel allows them to use their gifts and talents better than anywhere else; that equally rewards results, as well as the values and behaviors people exhibit in pursuit of those results.
Knowing from past experience that Chris Ihrig (CEO Edge) would be brilliant at facilitating such a daunting transition, I reached out to Edge Learning and Chris for help.
Through a series of conversations, Chris helped us diagnose the main issues, discern a way forward, and galvanize the senior team to pull together and pursue a unified agenda for change.
Chris’s approach brought clarity to our challenges and choices, built confidence and courage to move forward, and provided the support needed to achieve results. Rather than acting as a consultant or external expert, he partnered with us and became a co-creator of where we wanted to go and how to get there. He invested in us and our success, which allowed the team to quickly accept him, and which was critical to his effectiveness given the extremely participative nature of Pact’s culture. He took a progressive, yet non-linear approach that integrated several components that we needed. It was not a “textbook”, drag and drop engagement, but rather one that was high touch, highly contextualized, based on a deep understanding of our business drivers, our organizational personality, our “DNA” and our mission.
Perhaps Chris’ most critical role was as coach and confidante to me as I explored how best to navigate the landscape and advocate for people centered change at the organization. His engagement was a unique and impactful combination of strategy and tactics, encouragement and challenge, structure and flexibility. I am convinced that we would not have made the positive progress we have so far were it not for Chris’s involvement and the Edge approach.
Specifically, Chris and Edge provided a variety of integrated engagements and tools to build a performance culture. Chris conducted a Birkman assessment for my senior leadership team and processed it with us as a group. That served as a solid basis for further dialogue, exploration and planning when he facilitated our senior level Leadership Forum (approximately 30 senior staff from across the globe). At that Forum, Chris helped the group surface unexplored issues, which resulted in a breakthrough of “ownership” by the organizations leaders, and proved quite seminal to our progress to date. Subsequent to that facilitation, Chris has continued to provide coaching and high level leadership counsel and advice to me as CEO, as well as coaching to other members on the team. Most recently, Edge implemented a comprehensive Organizational Health Survey for us, the results of which are one of thirteen key metrics that we use to measure the overall performance of the organization and report to the Board of Directors. It is never easy to undertake such a sober look at the health of an organization and its culture, and is often fraught with misunderstanding and fear. Done poorly, I believe it can injure an organization as much as it could help. Chris helped us introduce and effectively communicate the rationale and benefits of the initiative and the tool, helped senior leadership process the results and understand the underlying causes and levers for change, and helped plan an effective way forward to making change.
We have made progress at Pact. But we have much more work to do. Building a resilient culture, where leaders inhabit their authority and promote talent, takes time. Chris and Edge have been, and will continue to be, a critical strategic partner for us as we continue to tackle the challenge.
Mark Viso
President and CEO
Pact, Inc