Practitioner Perspectives – Creating a High-Performance Culture by Design for a GBS Organization

Global Business Services (GBS) organizations typically span multiple locations and, accordingly, reflect the norms and experiences of different cultures and geographies. Due to the natural evolution of multi-location organizations, it is common that they develop somewhat different mindsets and ways of working, often making it challenging to create a universal high-performance culture. This, in turn, can lead to a fragmented GBS organization, unless this is proactively managed.

Celestica’s GBS organization intentionally oriented its development to include four “organizational processes.” These processes both create a high-performance mindset and generate cross-location culture, networks, and accountability. These four organizational processes have a “two-in-a-box” leadership model drawn from across their locations and create a “second hat” for each employee. The organizational processes operate in parallel with the operational processes, but the organizational process leadership is drawn from within the operational groups and does not add to the leadership responsibilities of the operational leaders, which provides increased development and networking opportunities across the teams while cementing relations across locations deeper into the organization.