Is your organization facing a strategic need for change but your team is unready to navigate change? Citi Performing Arts Center is a great case study of how an organization used the Balanced Scorecard to unfreeze, redirect and build a new culture to achieve breakthrough strategic results.

Professor John Vogel at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth has written a case study about Citi Performing Arts Center & the Balanced Scorecard to be taught in January 2013. The case highlights the challenges faced by the Boston-based performing arts organization as they executed an innovative strategy to reinvent and re-position the organization, the infrastructure and the financial model. Mobilizing the team to execute the new strategy was one of their greatest challenges.

A new strategy for Citi Center was documented and communicated internally and externally. However, some staff were resistant to the new strategy and left. Many leadership teams panic when this happens. Some will even change the strategy to mollify staff and retain dissenters. But the role of leadership is to make the difficult decisions that will maximize impact in support of the mission. The composition of the team may need to change and the culture of the organization will need to evolve. These changes are not a by-product of the strategy but a core component of strategy execution.

A closer look at the Citi Center case reveals some steps they took to foster a culture of change:

1. The strategy map and Balanced Scorecard were used to communicate the strategy to the organization.

2. Balanced Scorecard was cascaded to departments and relevant measures were selected.

3. Employees were able to articulate how they affected the strategy

4. Where they did not have the required capabilities in house they outsourced positions to access the needed skills.

5. Employee teams defined the values for the organization

Ultimately, it is your employees who make the strategy happen. Take the time to define the change that is required, assess the culture that will fuel success and manage both deliberately.

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