Carolyn Taylor
- Pioneer in Culture Change for over 30 years
- Best-selling author & podcast host
- Founder of leading culture transformation consultancy ‘Walking the Talk’
- Worked with over 100,000 leaders globally on how to role model and shape their target culture
Travels From
England
Carolyn Taylor | Courage and stepping out of your comfort zone
Carolyn Taylor | How you can personally shape culture
Carolyn Taylor | The ability to do it in the moment
Carolyn Taylor Speaker Biography
Carolyn Taylor is the founder of Walking the Talk, a division of ZRG Partners, a company widely identified as leading corporate consultancy, but is also globally recognized as one of the most experienced consultants and speakers on how to change corporate culture having personally walked beside hundreds of organizations and thousands of leaders. She is a best-selling author and hosts the Walking Your Talk podcast.
Most leaders and their organizations are seeking to change their culture to meet new market conditions: more accountability, customer centricity, innovation, and one-team enterprise thinking. Some enterprises are going through mergers, rapid growth, downsizing, reputation damage, turn arounds or building new organizations. Others still are aspiring to create the best place to work, globalize, and implement an agile way of working– to become faster, more efficient, more trustworthy. Carolyn gives leaders tips on what to do and not do.
The work is very personal and yet spreads across whole organizations. With this approach she has assisted Sheryl Sandberg when she was monetizing Google, David Thodey when he implemented customer-centricity at Telstra, Candido Bracher, now President of Itau Unibanco, over 10 years when he undertook a massive expansion in Latin America, Henri de Castries when he was uniting AXA's multiple acquisitions, and Paul Hudson during his rapid growth of Novartis Pharma. The meetings she facilitates and presentations she gives are insightful, profound, fun and provocative.
She is known for identifying a core issue and raising it in a way that is incisive, but loving. In the past 30 years, she has grown and founded two highly successful consulting businesses, pioneering culture transformation consultancy across the world.
Her talks are tailored both to participants and their roles and to the cultural goals of an organization. For example, when invited to speak to a group of finance directors in an organization whose goal it is to become more customer-centric, she will deliver a presentation on how the finance function shapes culture. She outlines what levers finance has to create more customer-centricity, not only within the function but across the whole organization.
Carolyn’s Walking Your Talk podcast is about leadership, authenticity and courage. Every episode is a personal development experience showing you how you can transform yourself and thus transform those around you and ultimately the organisation within which you work.
Carolyn has vast and varied expertise in six culture archetypes and can provide practical advice to leaders on these pillars of company culture:
• Achievement (accountability, responsibility, focus)
• Customer-Centricity (service, empathy)
• One-Team (collaboration, enterprise thinking)
• Innovation (agility, learning)
• People-First (engagement, empowerment)
• Greater-Good (ethics, purpose-led, values-led)
Carolyn is particularly good at creating unique presentations tailored to the culture goals of your organization and to the roles of those in the audience.
Examples of previous topics:
How leaders can drive a culture change
A practical approach to leading culture which will leave the audience clear about what they can do to both role model a target culture and encourage the right behaviors in others. Highly actionable.
Culture and its contribution to performance
How to quantify the contribution a great culture makes to performance, and how it can damage both performance and reputation if not managed well. Building the business case for why culture matters.
Leading specific culture goals: accountability, empowerment, ownership, simplicity, one-team, innovation, customer-centricity, entrepreneurship
Provide Carolyn with your target culture goals or values, and she will build a presentation which goes in depth on what each will require from leaders, and how to bring these to life in your organization.
The role of HR in supporting and leading culture change
HR has a special role in culture work – as coach, conscience, sponsor, supporter and the owner of the practical culture plan. Perfect for an HR audience
How to measure, manage and drive culture transformation
Culture is a crucial contributor to performance, but one which can be seen as ‘soft’ and hard to understand and manage. Not after this presentation. A practical guide on how to give culture the hard edge it needs to ensure it is given the focus and investment which will create change.
Leading culture during a merger
Every merger and acquisition runs up against the differences between the two cultures. Get this right and you build a culture which is best of both. Get it wrong and many people will leave, taking with them the value which drove the acquisition in the first place. An essential presentation for anyone involved in leading a merger or acquisition.
Building trust and lateral collaboration
Organizations need collaboration across the business to successfully service customers and build global or national operations. Buiding trust between teams is an essential success driver. Learn how this is done in this presentation.
