Citrix, a developer of cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, was founded in 1989 and became extremely successful, achieving revenues of $2.2 billion and employing over 7,000 employees by 2011. Citrix believed that this success was due, in large part, to its unique corporate culture and the unusually effective way in which its employees engaged with each other.
Citrix’s rapid growth, however, was creating cracks in the very culture of employee accountability that originally enabled it, resulting in different views of the culture by new and existing employees, serving as a notable corporate culture example. This prompted concern among Citrix’s leaders that the inconsistent perceptions could negatively impact how employees – who were now more geographically dispersed – worked together toward the company’s success. This employee engagement case study illustrates how Citrix sought a solution to help it continue to grow while maintaining the core values of the organization. A fantastic employee engagement example, this study clearly displays how to inspire change and motivation while simultaneously maintaining company culture.
Because of their familiarity with Leadership and Self Deception, Citrix engaged Arbinger for a series of workshops in 2012 on how to improve corporate culture making Citrix a compelling resource for this employee engagement case study. These sessions had a tremendous impact on the participants. The sessions also demonstrated a close correlation between
Arbinger’s approach and the work practices implied by the Citrix values. As a result of this experience, Citrix asked Arbinger to develop a customized program using Arbinger’s concepts to enable more effective implementation of Citrix’s core values across the company. Citrix saw in this approach a systematic way to scale their culture and ensure long-term business success.
The result of this work is Citrix’s program—Values Driven Leadership (VDL)—which was introduced in 2013. According to Marla Noble, who headed Learning and Development at Citrix at the time, in this training and implementation program Arbinger “articulated things that we ourselves were having a hard time articulating about our corporate culture.
It has provided fuel for people who were struggling to understand what our culture actually is tangibly bringing to life the expectations that we have of everyone.” The employee accountability plan combined with skills on how to improve corporate culture, developed a much more positive and collaborative work environment where maintaining company culture was incredibly easy.
The cornerstone of the VDL program is an initial workshop, followed by a number of customized tools and programs that further reinforce the concepts learned in the workshop and help participants implement the concepts in their day-to-day work. An important element in driving the program throughout Citrix has been a cadre of
Citrix employees that Arbinger has trained and is supporting the delivery of VDL to their fellow employees.This customized program enables Citrix employees to better understand themselves, their impact on others, and how they can be better
Leaders make it a compelling corporate culture example. Dave Friedman, formerly Citrix’s Senior Vice President of Human Resources said of the program, “What I’ve found incredibly powerful is when you realize that you may not only be the problem, but also the solution. It is incredibly powerful when you turn that paradigm around and can unlock the potential in a project or a relationship.” As Marla Noble put it, “You just see the light bulbs going off and people growing from that self-realization because the ideas make so much sense.”
More importantly, the program is having a significant impact on employee accountability, employees work with each other, and collaborate to deliver results. In every training session, according to Marla, Citrix has “discovered the potential for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in opportunities that we can gain by working in this way, and that’s just with 20 people in the room. I almost feel like there’s magic in the air—it’s almost like pixie dust.”
The impact on corporate culture continues after employees have completed the program. Marla describes having “emails with amazing stories from people who have gone through the program in which they describe what an important difference it is making in their lives inside and outside of work.” Because of this impact and these results, according to Marla, the program is “taking off like wildfire.” within Citrix.
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