Project overview
Background
As part of one of the world’s top universities, Imperial Business School operates in a complex, fast-paced environment. Following a period of change and team restructure within the Marketing function, there was an opportunity to pause and reflect on how the team worked together t and how collaboration could be strengthened both internally and across the wider institution. The aim was not to redesign everything from scratch, but to create space for honest conversation: to articulate a shared vision for the future, surface what was already working well, and identify practical ways to improve how the team collaborated day to day.
Our approach and action plan
Effective collaboration across a large organisation starts with clarity and trust within teams.. And we started as we meant to go on – by bringing everyone together to actively shape the culture they wanted in their team. SMRS hosted an interactive workshop on Imperial’s own site to:
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Inspire the team to look forward, think big and articulate their own vision.
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Identify opportunities for better collaboration and unlock any barriers.
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Encourage reflection on behaviours that nurture or prevent collaboration.
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Empower team members to take ownership of their team culture.
Part of how we created this safe space was by:
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Developing a bespoke and highly interactive workshop that included a mix of fun activities, reflective team tasks, lively debate and tangible outputs to agree together.
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Sending a pre-workshop survey to identify everyone’s current take and personal collaboration styles.
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Sharing what each collaboration style means so everyone understands how best to work together.
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Keeping the energy up so people felt comfortable, heard and involved.
Turning big potential into bite-sized commitments
The collaboration workshop highlighted so many opportunities – but once the day was over, it could be easy to lose momentum when back in the ‘day job’. The team needed more than a vision statement to get filed away, gathering dust. This had to be a living, breathing manifesto that was fully backed up with a realistic plan of how it would be achieved. Combining important conversations from the workshop, leadership discussions and our own insight and experience here at SMRS, we created an action plan that included:
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Micro-habits that could be adopted easily by everyone in the team to create a culture of collaboration.
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Shared responsibilities that could bring the team to meet and work together.
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Manager-led actions to establish initiatives/practices that encourage the team.
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Ways to track progress.
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Plenty of ideas on keeping the momentum going.
In their own words
In their
own words
Laura Delfitto, Director of Marketing at Imperial Business School
“The workshop created exactly the kind of space we needed as a team: thoughtful, open and focused on the future. What I particularly valued was the balance between ambition and realism. We didn’t just talk about what great collaboration could look like; we were honest about the pressures we face and what would genuinely help us work better together. Working with SMRS helped us turn those conversations into a clear direction and a practical way forward that the whole team could engage with.”
Meet a few members of our team
