A strong, adaptive culture fosters collaboration, innovation, and resilience. These are all essential for attracting top talent, retaining staff and enhancing your students’ experiences.
As you navigate funding pressures and increased competition, a positive, purpose-driven culture supports your strategic goals, academic excellence and institutional agility. By embedding your shared values and a sense of community, you can respond effectively to global challenges and maintain your relevance in the landscape.
SUMS consultants and practitioners are experts in the field of cultural change. We will work with you to describe your current culture and support you to define what success looks like for you. We’ll use our expertise to provide you with actionable insights on how to achieve success. And we’ll act as a critical friend to drive the cultural shift you need, as well as providing coaching and mentoring support so that you develop the skills you need to maintain it.
We know that a culture review is not a quick fix to an organisational problem. Positive culture change arises where there is openness from all stakeholders, and especially senior leaders, to drive the cultural shift over time.
Our approach is structured, collaborative and data-driven. We focus on a robust assessment and description of your current culture, looking at the cultural drivers that underpin it today. We use extensive stakeholder engagement and open dialogue to develop recommendations that will drive the cultural shift you need to achieve your goals. Then we support you to use ongoing monitoring and review against your established baseline to make sure the change sticks.
Often our culture reviews are linked to appropriate leadership development, including coaching, mentoring and self-reflection exercises.
Culture was constrained by the need to align with the University’s and Faculty policies and procedures, and those of the Scottish Government and key partners. With SUMS’ support the Institute committed to a culture change action plan, including a focus on competencies, tools, techniques and frameworks.
The School was the result of a merger between the previous School of Mathematics and School of Computer Science. Each of these had well-established cultures, visions and values. SUMS worked with inter-disciplinary groups to facilitate the development of a unified culture for the new School.
Whether you need an in-depth analysis and recommendations for significant transformation, or a more high-level review from a critical friend, we have the expertise to support you at every stage. In designing our support, we bring together higher education-specific insight from our comparative research and benchmarking, and world-leading effective practice from other sectors and internationally.
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