Organisation Effectiveness Cambridge (OE Cam LLP)
OE Cam is a specialist firm of business psychologists and organisation consultants. We help clients maximise the effectiveness and impact of individuals & teams to create more connected organisations.
We do this by combining leading-edge psychological and organisational insight with a thorough understanding of business need. We identify the talent you need, develop their capabilities, embed the values needed to work in this new environment and configure your organisations to enable the capable to flourish.
Our services include Talent Management (Executive Assessment, Leadership Development, Coaching, Team Effectiveness, Diversity & Inclusion) and Organisation Development (Board Effectiveness, Organisation Design, Change Management, Culture Change and Performance Management). We are a boutique consultancy, which means that your experience with us will be a personal one. We will invest the effort to get to know you and your organisation to jointly deliver the outcome you seek.
OE Cam clients include: Amber River Holdings, Arqiva, Associated British Foods, Alliance Pharma, Babraham Research Campus, Blue Earth Capital, BMJ, British Sugar, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, Coller Capital, Frontier Agriculture, Krispy Kreme, Primark, Rocksteady Studios, Spirax Sarco, Twinings, Wickes and Yorkshire Water.
“Based on my experience of the last three years, I can’t recommend OE Cam and Paolo Moscuzza highly enough. Paolo has been a stimulating and often helpfully provocative coach during a time of rapid growth and change in my organisation and my practice. His ability to listen carefully, probe incisively and offer up different perspectives on the issues at hand has been invaluable. As a result I’ve been able to influence and lead much more effectively. I’ve enjoyed every interaction and come away from them with a head full of ideas”.
Products and services
Performance Management
Performance Management activities allow organisations to assess, develop and maintain highly effective behaviours and capability within their teams. It often has the stigma of being the means by which leaders deal with poor performance, however, by utilising strengths-based and appreciative approaches, OE Cam ensures that performance management can be used positively for all team members, whether they need more support or are already high performers.
High performing organisations focus on three critical strands of performance management: strong feedback cultures; effective onboarding and proactive performance appraisal systems. By focusing on these three critical areas, we are able to evolve performance management activities into the day-to-day behaviours of leaders and managers, rather than being an annual chore, reinforced and policed by the internal HR team.
Our Approach to Performance Management
Our approach to performance management ensures an alignment of employee behaviours and capabilities with the fundamental business needs. As Business Psychologists our approach focuses on the mindset and behavioural aspects of performance management.
Building a strong feedback culture:
- 360 feedback design and facilitation – effective 360 feedback processes are specific and focused, measuring behaviours that are truly needed for the individual to perform their role effectively
- Appreciative Inquiry – incorporating strengths-based and future focused methodologies ensures continued growth whether an individual is high performing or needing additional support.
- Authentic feedback approaches – when asked, many employees cite fear of “getting it wrong” as the reason for delaying or not providing constructive feedback. We work with individuals and teams to find an approach to providing feedback in a way that feels comfortable and natural to them.
Effective Onboarding / Induction support:
Hiring key talent is expensive, so the retention of such talent is key to ensure real return on investment. For many new joiners, it can take up to a year to really embed themselves and feel like they are making a difference. OE Cam focuses on designing effective onboarding processes that speed up this process. We do this by understanding the behaviours within teams that need to be maintained or evolved when adding in a new team member. Working with not only the new joiner, but the wider team as well.
Proactive Performance Appraisal systems – our approach to performance management enables quick and continuous appraisal processes, that motivate and engage your teams.
What’s Involved?
Every project is bespoke, however our performance management projects typically include the following steps:
- Reflect on the established – All businesses are unique, meaning their business performance management processes should also be bespoke to their individual needs. Therefore, although underpinned by current best practice, OE Cam will work with you to understand your current ways of working and the impact they have on employee mindset, behaviours and capabilities.
- Consider the essential – Working in partnership with you, OE Cam will provide an experienced sounding board to identify what your business needs in terms of employee mindset, behaviours and capability. Supporting you to build a framework that will underpin your performance management practices, ensuring that they deliver the specific needs that are unique to your business. Regardless of the strand of performance management, OE Cam will partner with you to design performance management activities that will allow you to bridge the gap between the established and the essential.
- Make the change – Employee motivation and engagement is strongly linked to Performance Management processes, this means that any change to these processes should be socialised and implemented effectively to engage with employees. For OE Cam, this means that the design and facilitation of Performance Management is treated as a change management process and we work with you to embed this change in sustainable ways.
- Review and grow – Performance management is an ongoing process. As your business and employees grow, OE Cam will work with you, as a continuous partner, to reflect and develop as the business continues to adapt.
Why OE Cam?
We believe that performance management activities underpinned by psychological principles ensures greater return on investment; targeting the roots of employee performance rather than simply addressing the symptoms. Our approach seeks to fulfil immediate needs but also evolve attitudes around performance management in the longer term. By focusing processes on mindset shifts and behaviour change you will see more enduring and positive change in employee performance.
Culture Change
Effective organisations have alignment between what leaders say, how they behave and the actual operational processes within the business.
Culture is often described as “how things are done around here”. It is the combined set of behaviours, ways of working and business practices of an organisation. An organisation’s culture builds up gradually over time, to deal with its external world in which it interacts and its internal world of how power and resources are organised to get things done. This becomes a ‘dominant logic’ that runs through the organisation, so no matter how clever the people, they seem to be hard-wired into a certain way of thinking and so changing it can be complex and difficult.
Our Approach to Culture Change
Combining the insights from Business Psychology and Organisation Development, OE Cam can help you define and then deliver a change in culture. Specifically, we focus on the few critical behaviours that a business needs to demonstrate that are crucial to delivering the organisation’s strategy.
The first step in our approach is to help you define the target culture that will support and enable the delivery of your strategy. The aspirational culture needs to be broad enough to be inclusive, tight enough to have meaning and edgy enough to be challenging. Many cultural change programmes fail when the defined target culture is too generic and/or disjointed from the organisation’s reality.
Tailoring the target behaviours
In our experience, the right target culture will be articulated in a way that is specific to the organisation, in order to guide how people work together on a day-to-day basis, help when making difficult decisions, and identify acceptable and unacceptable ways of working.
Redesigning how we work
Our approach also goes beyond the traditional culture change programme and talent management processes. We also help you to look at what changes are needed to the work environment, work flows and how decisions get made, in order inhibit those behaviours you want to stop, and promote and embed the behaviours you need across the organisation.
Encouraging new habits
As Business Psychologists, we are also able to look more deeply into assessing which employee habits need to change and work with you to identify effective ways in which people can be nudged into adopting the right behaviours for the long-term.
What’s Involved?
Every project is bespoke, however culture change projects typically include the following aspects:
- Define your target culture with your senior leaders, who understand what is required to support the delivery of your strategic goals;
- With a cross-section of your colleagues, run focus groups to provide examples of how this target culture would manifest itself, and also actual examples of the culture today;
- Build a change programme that sets about encouraging a shift in behaviours. This can include changes to how you engage with your employees and changes in your HR processes such as recruitment and performance management;
- Review and change work processes that prevent the behaviours you are seeking to avoid, and promote those behaviours you need.
Why do I need culture change?
At certain times of their life, organisations can find that the behaviours, ways of working and business practices are ‘rubbing up’ against what is needed to survive and thrive in the external world in which it operates.
From inside the organisation, it can sometimes be difficult to step outside one’s environment and clearly articulate what behavioural change is needed to deliver the strategy.
Then, when delivering the change, the organisation’s leaders need to face up to changing “how things are done around here”, which often will challenge their own sets of behaviours and beliefs. It can also challenge their individual power base and could mean a significant change to how they operate.
Why OE Cam?
Our team of Business Psychologists and Organisation Consultants have the experience and expertise to help you shift your culture to become more innovative, customer centric and performance oriented.
We can help executive and senior teams manage the difficult transition from where it is today to where it needs to be, helping them face up to some difficult changes to ways of working. For example, we can provide external challenge to the organisation when defining its target culture, and ongoing coaching of the executive team as it grapples with unlearning old behaviours and introducing new ones.
Change Management
The only constant in business is change. This phrase has entered the lexicon of commentators, leaders and most businesses. The effective organisation is able to undergo change whilst at the same time continuing to delight customers, engage employees, deliver products or services and generate income.
‘Change Management’ is an approach that helps individuals, teams and businesses navigate the disruption while delivering business as usual. Done properly it can mitigate the risks while delivering and embedding the change required. Done badly it can wreak havoc and fail to deliver the required change; ineffective change negatively impact normal operation as well as leave the organisation with a lasting legacy that can damage its ability to successfully transform in the future.
In our experience, one of the main reasons change projects do not fully realise their potential is the failure to recognise and truly engage stakeholders at all levels within the organisation. Consequently, it is critical that any transformation programme includes a workstream that specifically addresses the people and culture aspects of change.
Our Approach to Change Management
As business psychologists, our approach focuses on engaging stakeholders and comes from a belief that everyone in the organisation has a role to play in designing and delivering successful change. This involvement gives employees a sense of ownership in the process and helps develop a commitment to a successful outcome. As a consequence the change seen as something ‘done to them’.
We do this by using the latest psychological and business research. We combine this with our expertise in thinking styles and changing mindsets to design effective change interventions.
Working closely with our clients, and in many cases with their technology partners, we co-design the change interventions. We act as experts and advisors on various change methodologies such as Kotter, ADKAR, and nudge theory.
We also bring a deep understanding around the implications of change on decision-making, power structures, governance and teams. We work with clients to understand how these need to change to support the transformed organisation.
Our clients are experts and advisors on their business, the market context they are operating in, commercial threats and the change they want to achieve to deliver their business strategic priorities. We are experts on the psychology of people and how they work in teams and organisation. Bringing these two perspectives together significantly increases the likelihood of successful change.
What’s Involved?
Every project is bespoke; however, change projects typically include the following stages:
- Plan: Develop a high-level programme & communication project plan. Work with stakeholders to develop a compelling change story to generate buy-in and start building employee engagement.
- Readiness: Diagnostic stage to understand the level of ‘change readiness’ in the organisation and map the current / future culture. This highlights the challenges that the project faces and the issues that need to be addressed.
- Design: Co-design the future organisation, which can include culture, governance and decision-making structures, future behaviours, Target Operating Model (TOM), ways of working and any other internal factors that will support the change.
- Implement: Work with senior leadership and organisation change champions to roll out the introduction of the required changes across the organisation. Work with leaders to understand how to act as role models of the new behaviours as well as provide the environment in which team members can exhibit the new culture.
- Embed: Develop nudge cues, support mechanisms, align processes and performance management to embed the implemented changes.
The above stages are supported by programme management and innovative communication:
- Programme management: Ensure all work on the change programme is integrated and delivers to cost, quality and time milestones.
- Communication: Design and deliver an innovative communication strategy and content to engage all stakeholders.
Change is an ongoing requirement for any business and the organisation needs to become self-sufficient so they can respond to future change quickly and effectively. We build this knowledge transfer into all of our projects.
Why do I need change management?
Change can be driven by several different business needs: updating or introducing a new IT system / technology, following an M&A, implementing a business strategy or a recognition that the organisation needs to modify its ways of working. Regardless of the business reason, people will be critical to the successful implementation of the change. As Peter Senge said that ‘People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!’ [1]
Great change management is the difference between people being positive advocates for the change and being people who potentially block the new ways of working. Developing an engaged workforce who understand, and have really bought into the change, will reduce the overall time taken and resources, both human and financial, needed to deliver successful change.
Organisation Design
In order to deliver on your purpose and vision, an effective organisation needs to put in place the right structure, processes and governance to enable it to be aligned, accountable and agile.
We help organisations find the ‘sweet spot’ – where the design of the organisation connects with its employees and unleashes business performance.
Our Approach to Organisation Design
We take a holistic approach to organisations in order to make them:
- Aligned – linking structures, processes and people to strategy
- Accountable – with a clear understanding and ownership of how the organisation works and how decisions get made and implemented
- Agile – adaptable to the changing external conditions.
This requires us to look at how to best configure structures, processes, and capabilities, and how teams and individuals interface with each other in order to make effective decisions.
As a team of organisation consultants and business psychologists, we are particularly known for tackling complex organisational challenges that require both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ elements.
What’s Involved?
Every project is bespoke, however our organisation design projects typically include the following aspects:
- Organisation Principles: Translate your strategy into a set of organisation principles – what does the organisation need to do /enable, in order to support the delivery of your strategic goals?
- Organisation Mapping: we help you map out your current organisation:
- Define the key value-added activities that your business needs to undertake
- Create a single map of the organisation, showing where your existing functions / teams sit against those key activities
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the current organisation – Identify what works (what you want to keep), and what doesn’t work regarding structures, processes, capabilities and motivation
- Identify and evaluate the future organisation options
- Conclude on a preferred option
- Build a transition plan to preferred option, taking account of existing capabilities and motivations.
Why do I need Organisation Design?
There are certain pivotal moments in time when an organisation needs to review and reshape how it is structured and how it makes decisions. For example, this can be when a firm changes strategic direction, or experiences a change in market conditions – or it is simply finding it hard work getting decisions made and responding to market pressures.
When these moments arise, if there is complexity around how the organisation operates, and /or if there could be challenges to the balance of power around the top team, then using an independent trusted advisor to work with the Exec becomes critical.
Why OE Cam?
Our experience in organisational change means that we understand how organisations behave. And our expertise in business psychology means that we understand how people ‘work’ – how to effectively navigate the complex dynamics of organisational life.
We work alongside the leadership team and/or an internal project team and take a holistic approach to organisation design across the functions.
Board Effectiveness
Boards of Directors are most effective when they have four elements in place: alignment around strategy, clarity about team role, the right balance of behaviours and the right mix of capabilities.
However, unlike an Executive team, a Board is deliberately non-homogenous, with different stakeholder representation, requiring independent thinking and challenge.
As well as developing individual skills to deliver the strategy, a crucial part of board development is building the capability to allow diversity of opinion to be channelled constructively.
Our Approach to Board Effectiveness
Our board practice has extensive experience in both board evaluation and board development.
Independent Board Evaluation
OE Cam’s board evaluation audit identifies compliance with governance codes and company articles. We examine the internal governance processes, schemes of delegation and actual practice. We assess the independence of Non-Executive Directors and their engagement with the business.
Whilst board role, process, structure and specification are important and necessary, on their own they are not sufficient elements of effectiveness. We believe that the greatest contributor to board effectiveness is its behaviour, team dynamic and capability. This is the key differentiator in our board evaluation methodology.
In our experience, the Board–Executive interaction can be improved significantly by building an understanding of, and improving performance around, six perspectives:
- Power – understanding the powers that the Board has and the extent to which the Executives are influenced by Board power
- Challenge and support – provided by the Board, and getting the balance right
- Trust – and the quality of ‘informal’ as well as ‘formal’ relationships between the Board and Executives
- Materiality – Data sets used and the opportunity for the Board to come to a view
- Risk – perceptions of, and appetite for, risk
- Judgement – and how it is brought to bear on strategy, performance, risk and behaviour.
A core part of our approach is to transfer this understanding to the client and we work hard to ‘take people with us’ so key stakeholders are more engaged in the change.
We design the scope and rigour of evaluation to meet the individual context of each board. For some, a questionnaire may be sufficient; for others a deeper review of constitutional practices and behaviour is required.
Board development
Outputs from a board evaluation skills & experience questionnaire along with insights from one-to-one interviews and meeting observations are invaluable inputs to inform an overall board development plan.
As experts in behavioural change, we use psychological insight to deliver board development through:
- Team workshops
- One-to-one coaching
- Periodic Board and Committee observation with real-time feedback.
We work with clients to create a common vision of the purpose of the board, its roles and how it interfaces with the Executive. As well as collective coaching and development, we also coach individual directors in how to deliver the non-executive role, by providing external challenge and being a sounding-board for tackling specific issues.
What’s Involved?
Every project is bespoke, however both board evaluation and board development typically include the following aspects:
- Stakeholder engagement – crucial to gain collective buy-in to the process
- Diagnostics / research – understand what’s working well and what needs to improve at individual and team level. This is often through psychometrics, skills questionnaire, review of board papers, previous board evaluation reports and one-to-one interviews
- Observation – attend board/committee meeting(s) to assess board behaviours first-hand. We assess behaviours against a pre-defined set of criteria regarding direction, oversight and quality of Board member relationships (re: challenge and support)
- Feedback & analysis – one-to-one meetings to give feedback on individual strengths and development priorities. We report back key collective themes to Chair/CEO and work with them to co-design a development programme
- Tailored individual and team development programme which could include:
- Individual coaching
- Team workshop modules (incl. key speakers, role playing with actors, business simulation, offsite away day)
- Pre and post-programme evaluation to demonstrate value and benefits of improved performance.
Why do I need board effectiveness?
Many boards have adopted the practice of an external review every two or three years with the Chair conducting an internal review in the intervening years.
Our extensive experience coupled with our imaginative approach allows us to bring external best practice, impartial challenge and constructive development to board excellence.
Why OE Cam?
As specialists in organisation behaviour, OE Cam goes beyond the formal requirements of corporate governance and legislation by applying psychological insight to enhance board behaviour and relationship dynamics. This means that we understand the blockers to performance improvement and can identify the most effective methods for individuals and teams to move forward.
Team Effectiveness
Executive teams are most effective when they have six elements in place:
- Team members really understand and work well with one another’s diverse working styles and communication preferences
- There is alignment around strategy
- A shared sense of business purpose, values and ways of working
- Clarity about team role
- The right balance of behaviours and
- The right mix of capabilities.
This needs to be supported by an organisational culture that empowers the team to behave in an agile way; to take risks, continuously learn and a willingness to work through challenges together in order to move the business forwards.
OE Cam works with teams to improve their collective effectiveness. Using psychological insight and coaching techniques, we build individual awareness of self and others and help leaders harness diversity within the team.
Diverse perspectives are important in delivering better business outcomes. However, it is trust and commonality that binds people together which means the team dynamic can be complex… Our approach enables team members to really understand one another’s working styles and communication preferences. We re-align the team around a common goal and demonstrate how individuals can play to their strengths to achieve it.
What’s Involved?
Every OE Cam project is bespoke, however team effectiveness assignments typically include the following aspects:
- Diagnostic – psychometric profiling that predicts both individual and collective preferred leadership styles and personal drivers
- Individual interviews & feedback – one-to-one sessions with a Business Psychologist
- Analysis & insights – collation and review of key themes from diagnostics
- Design & Development – based on key themes, we co-create development event(s) with a focus on behaviours and business outcomes
- Delivery – development workshop(s) or team offsite coupled with coaching
- Evaluation & Action Plans – review of outcomes and agreement of individual
Why do I need team effectiveness?
Every team, regardless of how long they have been working together, benefits from periodically reviewing performance against these six dimensions. The business context and team composition invariably change over time and it is important to provide regular opportunities for team members to reconnect and refocus in order to maximise team effectiveness.
An HBR article summarising the findings from global study of employee engagement neatly captures the importance of teams:
“Your experience of your team drives many things: how productive you are at work; how happy you are at work; how creative, innovative, and resilient you are; and how long you choose to stay with your company. In other words, when it comes to your work, great teams and teamwork aren’t a nice-to-have; they’re a must-have”.
(The Power of Hidden Teams, May 2019, Harvard Business Review).
Why OE Cam?
Quite often teams get ‘stuck’ into a certain pattern of behaviour and need external, objective input to understand what is going on and why.
As experienced Business Psychologists, OE Cam provides clear insight into team strengths & ‘watch-outs’ and co-creates practical development plans to enable to the team to move forwards.
What makes our psychological insight different is that we also draw upon our expertise as organisation consultants. This means that our advice is set in the context of OD knowledge such as Target Operating Models, board governance and performance management. We believe this delivers more holistic, sustainable OE solutions for our clients.
Leadership Development
No one is born with all the skills and capabilities they need to be an effective leader. The business landscape continuously shifts and leaders need to be lifelong learners in order to adapt and remain effective. Today’s leader is a juggler of competing forces, an explorer of ideas and an exemplar of strong values. They need to navigate through ambiguity, be agile, authentic and an inspirational force for change; all whilst being an enabler of others and having a clear vision for business direction.
A well-designed leadership development programme is one that defines effective leadership in an inclusive way and provides a blended and stimulating approach to learning. Combined with coaching, the programme provides an excellent opportunity to develop the right skills and behaviours to support the organisation in realising its strategy.
Our Approach to Leadership Development
We start with helping you to define the leadership behaviours and learning outcomes you need for your business to succeed in the short, medium and long term. Sound diagnostics to understand the context is absolutely key to our approach.
We then help you to understand your people; what drives them and how they learn. As Business Psychologists, we help organisations to achieve more sustainable behavioural change through developing an individuals’ self-awareness, building intellectual insight and shifting mindset. A particularly relevant model for today is Agile Mindset – to learn more about this, please download our white paper which explains the 4 critical dimensions of an agile mindset.
With an understanding of business context and your people, we can then work together on designing a blended leadership development programme that is fit-for-purpose and integrates with your broader talent management framework. This will integrate into day-to-day activities. It is essential the programme motivates, inspires and excites delegates and is memorable for years to come. Above all, we remain participant-focused to ensure our delivery is relevant for the audience and people are truly engaged in the process.
Learning can also be supported by our digital learning platform. This provides individuals with additional opportunities to recap key messages from workshops at their own pace and helps ‘nudge’ habits through repetition and useful reminders. Delegates also use the online platform to communicate and share learning information and ideas with one another 24×7.
What’s Involved?
Our leadership development method is bespoke, but typically incorporates the following aspects:
- Development of a competency framework/success criteria/charter that reflects the business need and the context of future leadership requirements of the organisation
- Individual/team learning assessment against the leadership competencies to reveal the individual and team development areas
- Creation of individual development plans highlighting strengths, watch outs and priorities and how the person will best learn
- Tailored individual and team development programme which could include:
- Psychometrics
- Individual coaching
- Team workshop modules (incl. key speakers, role playing with actors, business simulations and projects)
- Online support
- Pre and post-programme evaluation to demonstrate value and benefits of improved performance.
We are expert in building connected, ‘ambi-dextrous organisations’ – so we understand the importance of delivering ‘quick wins’ that drive operational efficiency as well as developing leadership behaviours that inspire innovation and build engagement in the future vision.
There are typically three triggers for building the capability of leaders:
- Developing the capability to lead in a changing environment e.g. technological change, competitor threats, business opportunities, anticipated growth and changing customer expectations.
- Building the bench-strength through identifying and developing the next generation of leaders. This can be triggered by corporate governance requirements or by preparation for a future event (e.g. IPO, business sale)
- Supporting Mangers to become Leaders: OE Cam recognises the important role that all managers play as catalysts or blockers to organisation effectiveness. Often managers lack the necessary mindset, capability and skills to enable them to fulfil their potential as future leaders; to think more strategically beyond the day-to-day operational practices, to take on greater accountability and make decisions in an uncertain, fast-moving environment. We work with senior leaders to build capability to deliver strategic change, while also helping to accelerate the emergence of future leaders by creating ‘Agile and Accountable’ mid-level managers. Managers who are more aligned to the organisation purpose and proactively contribute to the delivery of business objectives.
Our series of focused learning modules can be a great way to try out the OE Cam approach to learning. Our short sessions include:
- Dealing with Change & Ambiguity
- Building Individual Resilience using Positive Psychology
- Principles of Agile Leadership
- Coaching 101 – building coaching skills into the everyday
- Building Awareness of Unconscious Bias
- Giving Effective Feedback
- Communicating with Impact
- Enhanced Emotional Intelligence
- Managing Difficult Conversations
- Leading Virtual Teams
- The Art of Influencing and Negotiation
- Unlocking Women's Leadership Potential
To learn more about these short sessions, please email Paolo Moscuzza at paolo.moscuzza@oecam.com
Why OE Cam?
As business psychologists, we have an in-depth understanding of human behaviour, motivation, learning and behaviour change. Our leadership development methodology is underpinned by our qualifications and practical expertise in applied Occupational Psychology to ensure we engage, motivate and help individuals understand and fulfil their potential.
This combined with more than 30 years of business understanding, knowledge, and consulting experience in business management, training, and HR allows us to create leadership development programmes that challenge individuals to improve performance while tackling immediate key business issues and delivering business projects.
Coaching & Mentoring
Coaching is a powerful lever for business growth, maximising the effectiveness of talent, unlocking potential and underpinning sustainable organisational excellence.
OE Cam’s executive coaches are both expert in business psychology, and in businesses and organisation management. Whilst many of our tools and techniques are ‘tried & trusted’, we keep our thinking fresh by regularly attending events run by European Mentoring & Coaching Council, the British Psychological Society and the Association of Business Psychologists. We work in partnership with the both the individual and the leadership of the organisation to ensure alignment with current and future business objectives. We work with individuals and teams to define and reinforce what they do well and challenge them to identify where and how they could improve to maximise their personal effectiveness.
OE Cam offers an unrivalled coaching proposition. With over 30 years experience OE Cam is known and valued for the exceptional relationships we build with our clients and their people. Our coaching meets the needs of leaders, senior executives of private and public sector organisations, partners, principals and managers in professional services firms and senior officials in public bodies and Government.
Our Approach to Coaching
We liken our coaching approach to that of the Sports Coach and the Athlete. At times, the coach needs to inspire or mentor the athlete through a difficult time. At other times they direct the action with clear instructions or design technical exercises for the athlete to try. The relationship is ‘on demand’; it is not a fixed set of predefined sessions. We believe that the coach plays many varied roles and helps to create the right conditions for the individual to fulfil their potential.
Our approach is open and flexible, designed to adapt and focus on the individual within the business needs and work context. It is also integrative, utilising a range of diagnostic tools and techniques to tackle the conscious, unconscious, and behavioural aspects of individuals and teams.
The coaching process is an ongoing learning experience that empowers the individual to maximise their effectiveness and increase their personal impact within the business.
“Based on my experience of the last three years, I can’t recommend OE Cam and Paolo Moscuzza highly enough. Paolo has been a stimulating and often helpfully provocative coach during a time of rapid growth and change in my organisation and my practice. His ability to listen carefully, probe incisively and offer up different perspectives on the issues at hand has been invaluable. As a result I’ve been able to influence and lead much more effectively. I’ve enjoyed every interaction and come away from them with a head full of ideas”.
What’s Involved?
Individual differences and personal circumstances mean that every coaching situation is different. However, the coaching process typically follows three stages:
- Chemistry & Plan: Our first meeting is about personal ‘chemistry’; this is an opportunity to get to know one another and build a common understanding of what is required. We then begin to develop the relationship, gathering evidence relevant to the situation (e.g. psychometrics or 360 feedback) and identifying a specific opportunity to tackle. This enables us to agree a plan together.
- Action & Feedback: On the basis of the plan, the coachee is encouraged to agree actions to take on which observations are fed back as part of the coaching sessions. Our aim is to increase self-awareness; awareness of their impact compared to desired outcomes and work through alternative/additional strategies or tactics to test out. Coaching activities could include one-to-one meetings or video calls, a role-play session with actors or a lastminute emergency phone call prior to an important meeting.
- Review: Evaluating the impact of the coaching is an integral part of our approach to coaching. We agree with the individual measurable objectives that they hope to achieve and check the results against these objectives.
Our Executive coaching services broadly fall into three areas of application:
- Individual – we help people to be the best versions of themselves. We use psychological insight to help build self-awareness and techniques such as appreciative inquiry, visualisation and nudge to help build capability in specific areas. We may also work with two individuals to help to improve effectiveness of relationships between them.
- Team – team coaching can cover situations such as improving team relationships and focusing on business goals, building new teams, relationships between teams or developing new strategies and opportunities. When coaching a team, a balance is struck between helping the team manage both process and content. The coach may provide constructive challenge where necessary and help facilitate team-working, acting as a bridge between the team and the situation they are dealing with.
- Organisation – training people to be coaches is important to assure the development of a coaching culture. We offer a range of workshops to build internal capability for sustainable co-coaching practices.
Why OE Cam?
You would choose OE Cam as your coach because you are looking for someone who understands the psychology of individual behaviour and can apply that insight in a practical way. But what’s different about OE Cam’s coaching, is that we understand the organisational context and can adapt our approach accordingly.
We are a specialist consultancy, which means that your experience with us will be a personal one. Our approach is bespoke to each client – whether we are coaching a Chief Executive new to the post or delivering coaching support for 60 Operations Directors as part of a broader leadership development programme.
Executive Assessment
Executive assessment is the starting point in understanding the leadership talent you have within an organisation. As Business Psychologists, we help organisations evaluate the capabilities, behaviours and character strengths of its leaders. Having the right leaders in the right roles at the right point in time is a key element of organisation effectiveness.
At OE Cam we do not believe there is one leadership model that fits all. The world of work, the changing nature of communication and diversity of people within organisation is far too complex to simplify leadership into any one generic model. We focus on assessments that identify the leadership your organisation will require in the next few years in order to deliver commercial results in the ‘right’ way. For example, there is a big difference between good ‘all round’ leaders and ‘disruptive talent’ leaders – and we know how important it is not to confuse the two.
The outcome is a powerful evaluation of a leader’s future behaviour and fit with your organisation giving you the confidence to make the right people decisions.
Our Approach to Executive Assessment
OE Cam’s leadership assessments are based on our ERCONIC™ in-depth interviewing methodology. This method focuses on a leader’s life and career history, looking for patterns or inconsistencies to understand both personal and career motives and drivers. We explore what the individual has been good at and not so good at, how they have developed over time, their self-awareness and conscious competence / incompetence. We cross-reference this with psychometric profiles and our knowledge about the business and the role.
Insights from this process enable us to make a judgement about the accuracy of the data and predicted capability against the requirement of the role. We reveal the strengths, fit, development areas and motivations of the individual; giving you a reliable and predictive picture of their future behaviour and performance.
The result is a decision on whether the individual will deliver what the business needs them to deliver.
What's involved?
OE Cam Executive Assessments typically include the following steps:
- Robust psychometric assessments that are accredited with the British Psychological Society
- ERCONIC™ in-depth interview to verify findings and reveal the strengths, fit, development areas and motivations of a candidate
- Objective scoring to observe the behaviour of potential recruits in real situations that closely match the types of work they would be doing in the role
- Precise reports about the individual being assessed, sharing our insights and evidence-backed judgment of a candidate’s suitability and predicted performance in the future
- Benchmarked norms to compare candidates for similar roles across a broad range of businesses
- Assessment Centres where several candidates are being considered for the same role, observing their interactions within teams as well as their performance across a series of relevant business simulations.
Why do I need Executive Assessment?
Our executive assessment services broadly fall into five areas of application:
- Talent Management – We support organisations in understanding existing talent. This provides the basis for maximising the effectiveness of leaders and identifying succession gaps and opportunities. This is much more than just good governance; it is about optimising your return on your investment in leaders. These assessments can be for individuals or groups of leaders.
- Mergers & acquisitions – Commercial acquisitions typically focus on assets, portfolios and business synergies; however, it is the people issues that are most commonly cited as the root cause of failure. “Up to 85% of M&A failures are attributable to problems in the integration of employees and the management of cultural issues in the merger or acquisition.” (Corporate Leadership Council). Our leadership due diligence has been proven to be effective at identifying leadership issues and opportunities during mergers & acquisitions. Our business psychologists provide advice on how to address the issues and maximise the opportunities so the business gains the greatest value from the deal.
- Disruptive Talent programmes – “The most reliable sources of unexpected growth in revenues and margins are disruptive products and business models.” HBR 2011. Our disruptive talent assessments identify individuals who will be catalysts for disruptive change. We identify how to manage those individuals and provide advise on how put teams around them to bring out the good disruption and minimise the bad disruption. This helps manage your people risks in high potential growth areas.
- Senior & top team development – Great individuals do not equate to great teams. Even the best combinations of individuals have to work at relationships. Our work focuses on identifying how senior teams can work in the most effective way to maximise their effectiveness. We assess and work with senior teams individually and collectively to support them in achieving their potential.
- Business re-structuring – New business opportunities can mean that different capabilities are required. We support organisations to determine the new requirements and design and deliver assessment processes to identify gaps between the existing capability and future requirements of the organisation. These can take the form of individual assessments or assessment centres where groups of individuals go through a series of simulated exercises on the same day.
Why OE Cam?
We are a boutique consultancy, which means that your experience with us will be a personal one. Our approach is bespoke to each client – whether we are delivering confidential assessments to replace Chief Executives or 600 assessments for more junior staff.
Whether you are looking at managing your leadership talent, succession planning or identifying leadership for radical change, our approach combines robust psychological methodologies with a clear business focus. OE Cam executive assessments are carried out by experienced business psychologists, many of whom have personally held leadership roles and so understand the commercial pressures and the trade offs that leaders have to make.
Unlocking Women's Leadership Potential - training course in Cambridge
OE Cam has designed a new leadership programme specifically for women – providing a neutral, inclusive space to unlock women’s leadership potential.
Today’s leader is an explorer of ideas, a juggler of competing forces and an exemplar of strong values. They need to navigate ambiguity, be agile, authentic and an inspirational force for change; all whilst being an enabler of others and having a clear vision for business direction... To build such capabilities requires ongoing leadership development and research suggests that women learn best in a group of fellow women. With this in mind, our Business Psychologists have designed a programme with four integrated modules to unlock women’s leadership potential.
Ideal for those in management making the leap to Leader, our open programme offers women a safe, inclusive space to explore and develop their leadership style within a cohort of like-minded professionals. A key aspect of our approach is tailoring content to the female voice and sharing relevant stories that draw on our experience of coaching women in senior leadership positions.
“Unlocking Women’s Leadership Potential” will be delivered in-person, from 10am-3pm in central Cambridge on the following dates:
- The Adaptable Leader – 7th November 2023
- The Confident Leader – 5th December 2023
- The Persevering Leader – 9th January 2024
- The Developmental Leader – 13th February 2024
The cost is £895pp + VAT for all four modules and includes a webinar for Line Managers to support participants on their leadership journey.
To learn more or register interest for you or a colleague, please visit our website or contact me for more information.