UK Government Agency

Dragonfish has partnered with a government agency since 2023, to support the people-led culture and digital transformation of a 230-year-old heritage organisation, building the leadership behaviours and change capability needed to deliver its future strategy. 

Strategy alone would not sustain the organisation's world-leading position: it needed a clear, shared direction and the cultural and organisational capability to deliver it, and to understand how culture enabled, or constrained, performance and transformation. 

The challenge was to align over 1,000 colleagues behind a single vision, embed a customer-centric mindset, and equip leaders to drive sustainable change through a shared way of working.

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Our work began with a deep culture diagnostic, combining Executive and Board interviews, culture labs, focus groups, an anonymous survey and in-context observation. 

This identified six critical factors for unlocking high performance: clarity of focus, customer centricity, organisational connectedness, trust and accountability, psychological safety and belonging, and change readiness. We translated these insights into action, co-creating the organisation's leadership expectations
("How We Lead") and ways-of-working behaviours ("How We Work"), aligned
to the new vision. 

These were embedded through a leadership development programme (360° feedback, psychometric profiling, coaching and targeted development) and a consistent approach to measurement and learning reviews.

Impact: 

The impact has been visible in 2025 Civil Service People Survey results, including:

• 19-point increase in belief in the vision
• 8-point increase in clarity of organisational objectives
• significant increase (25%+)  psychological safety
• 7-point increase in eNPS to 76%, their highest ever score

Results: 

Through targeted investment in culture and performance in the flow of work and by focussing on engagement, accountability, talent potential and building change capability they have improved project success measures, increased safety and quality scores and also now outperformed on stakeholder and shareholder expectations in terms of CX, revenue and EBITDA in the last FY.