GABRIELLE PIMSTONE
International bank
From "a great place to work" to "a great place to bank"
When an international bank slipped from #1 to #4 in the region, the leadership team set bold ambitions to reclaim their competitive edge. While they had built a strong reputation for care and employee engagement, the culture had become too inward-looking – at the expense of client focus, innovation, and commercial agility.
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I led a multi-year culture transformation to rebalance the focus – preserving the organisation’s strengths while embedding a sharper outward orientation, grounded in greater client centric innovation, agility, and performance differentiation.
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Using the Competing Values Framework as a foundation, I facilitated a culture transformation process led through dialogue, not initiatives. We began with the ELT and cascaded through the Top 250 and then to 8,000 leaders – surfacing and shifting deeply held assumptions that were standing in the way of the bank’s strategic aspirations.
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We introduced new diagnostics to move beyond engagement scores – tracking cultural patterns at the organisational, team, and individual leadership levels. I also partnered with senior leaders to define a new leadership persona aligned with the desired culture, embedding it through ELT alignment sessions, Top 250 and Top 500 immersions, and refreshed leadership development across business units.
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The result: A redefined culture – and a return to competitiveness, climbing from #4 to #2 in the region.
Global telco
From a sales-led culture to an engineering-led future
Two business units within a global Telco were undergoing a strategic integration - aligning structure, systems, processes, and culture - in response to shifting market demands. To stay commercially viable and grow their position in the B2B space, they needed to shift from siloed, product-led service delivery to converged, client-centred solutions – with a single point of contact and a seamless customer experience.
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I led the cultural integration using my methodology for M&A culture alignment. We began with a cultural readiness assessment, which uncovered core misalignments in values, ways of working, and assumptions about what drives success. A key decision was made early: to align the integrated business around the culture of the smaller (but more future-fit) unit – one grounded in engineering excellence, precision, and long-term innovation.
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The work was dialogue-led. We mapped the cultural alignment, then moved through a series of targeted leadership alignment sessions and team integration processes to bring the new culture to life. These were followed by a post-integration review and refinements to ensure the shift held.
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The breakthrough came when leaders stopped viewing the integration as a clash of two cultures and started seeing it as an opportunity to deliberately shape a new way of working – one that could meet the evolving needs of their customers and the business. Once that shift occurred, momentum accelerated.
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The result: A successful business acquisition – and a unified culture anchored in shared purpose, strategic clarity, and innovation.​​
Founder-led scale up
Corporatising a family-run business
A family-run business had secured backing from a venture capital firm, with a clear ambition: to corporatise the business and scale it to become the #1 player in the region. While the company had grown on the back of strong founder values and personal relationships, those same qualities were now limiting its ability to scale.
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I worked with the CEO and executive team over a multi-year period, combining individual and team coaching. The core shift was a mindset one: from relying on informal alignment with founder values to recognising that scaling required structure – formalised processes, clearer accountability, and consistent ways of working across the business. It also meant letting go of functional familiarity, as Ed Schein describes – moving beyond comfort and legacy roles to build the capability the next chapter demanded.
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The breakthrough came when the CEO made the difficult but necessary decision to let go of his brother – a member of the executive team whose presence was holding back the shift. That moment signalled to the wider organisation that the business was serious about transformation.
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The result: The organisation evolved from a tightly held founder-led business into the regional industry leader – with a clear strategy, aligned leadership, and a culture ready for scale.