Case Study: The Riverside Group

The Riverside Group is a major Social Housing and Care provider in the UK with operations spanning the country through regionals divisions.   Headquartered in Liverpool and at the time of our assignment, with a turnover of £300m with approximately 53,000 homes and 3,000 staff.

Bourton was engaged by Riverside on a broad organisational development and change management programme with the objective of developing senior leadership capability.  As part of our consulting appointment, we were asked to design and deliver a one-day change leadership module for the organisations middle managers.

The organisation had grown dramatically over time through expansion and mergers.  And, there had been significant effort put into developing a shared vision for a ‘One Riverside’ approach to operations, ways of working, and organisational culture.

Each directorate or operating division had been encouraged to establish its own contribution to the overall corporate plan, but to some extent, whilst performance was good, silo thinking was evident. .  In that regard, change was very much on the agenda and it was thought that managers could benefit greatly from pragmatic change tools to assist them in delivering their own transformation.

The challenge facing senior managers was to create a culture of performance improvement aligned to corporate change activity, develop shared approaches to managing change, and at the same time develop stronger employee engagement in that change.