testimonials

If you require additional information or would like to know more about future workshops, please contact our team at Denison Consulting.

I am the owner of Lynch Bryan Consulting, LLC and was introduced to the Denison Survey through a client in Washington DC a few years ago and recognized the impact the tools could offer our clients.  I finally made time to attend the certification workshop in October 2018 and the experience exceeded my expectations. In our practice, we often help organizations wrestle with the intangibles that affect their culture.  We use a discovery process that is robust and time consuming, yet important to collect critical information and create buy in for changes that the organization may ultimately make.

During the Certification Workshop, it became evident that the Denison tools could accelerate the discovery process and help us move more quickly to analysis and problem solving. Dan Denison and his team discussed the research and validity of the tools, along with case studies and opportunities to practice application during the workshop. The participants represented diverse industries, experiences and cultures, further expanding our understanding of potential application. I left the workshop feeling confident that we can use Denison in a variety of scenarios to uncover elements of  cultures that support an organization’s desired results and those that need attention.  A win for us and a win for our clients!  I highly recommend Denison for internal Organizational Development professionals or for those of us in the consulting business.

Lori Bryan
Owner
Lynch Bryan Consulting, LLC.

I attended the Denison workshop after doing my homework and coming to the conclusion that the Denison model of high-performing cultures is perfectly aligned with what I have learned about the relationships between leadership, culture and performance in my 30-year career as a senior HR executive.  The highlight of the workshop was interacting with other participants who have worked with Denison Consulting for several years and have seen the work move the needle in their organization.  I am definitely more equipped in my own consulting practice to support my clients’ needs with these tools.

Mark Hinderliter
Principal
Third Way Inc.

As a practitioner who has used the Denison performance and survey model since the early 2000’s—leading and engaging in several levels of administration for 8 cycles of its application at the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency—I have experienced the value that both the instrument and the process create, providing focus for an organization, both at the enterprise and work unit level.

I joined other businesses here this week to get a deeper appreciation of how culture influences the performance of an organization and the tools Denison offers to facilitate culture change. I’ve done my doctoral studies in this area and now through my new business, I’m focused on helping businesses of all sizes understand how culture becomes a valued performance capability.

A key takeaway from the workshop for me is that it all starts with the leaders’ behaviors. These drive the culture. There is a clear imperative that leaders understand their significance and the influences they have on the culture of their organization…how the workforce sees itself and sees the organization…and the relationship of that to business performance. The Denison Model and methodology can be applied here to advantage across the board.

Shawn Magill
CEO/President
Solutions4Success Consulting, LLC

Our firm assists companies in helping veterans transition and assimilate into their organization. Our competency centers on managing stress and trauma episodes that occur during transition and on-boarding. We see an opportunity to assist the organization’s leaders in setting up a successful process to optimize this transition and the inclusion of veterans.

Culture is key. These men and women are moving from one culture—the military where it’s very directive, you have orders and you fulfill them—and the private sector business culture—where you need to learn to initiate and read the nuance of a situation.

We’ve been looking for some tools that we could use to help businesses understand how veterans are doing in this cultural transition and for the veterans to get structured feedback as to how they compare to the rest of the organization as well as a global benchmark. Denison was so attractive to us, especially the engagement piece in the Denison survey, that I wanted to come and learn how we could apply these tools to help our clients maximize their outcomes both in terms of veteran employees contribution to the organization and the veterans own personal success and sense of well-being as they begin to see themselves as truly part of the organization.

What I hoped to get, in coming out to the Certification Workshop, was a full understanding of Denison: the platforms and the tools that they offer. And, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “fully satisfied,” I’m fully satisfied!

Robert Reed
President
Transition-Integrated-Resources

I co-founded two coffee houses and a roasting facility in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1993. I manage young people between the ages of 18 to 27 who are in school, or trying to figure out what to do with their lives. It’s always a challenge to make them feel like this is their “real job.” However, I believe part of my role in society is to prepare these employees for the “real world.”

Culture is everything. It does not matter if I have the best coffee in the universe, if the culture of my company is unclear. We try to create a culture that values both hard-core work ethic & caring about how we make people feel.

My employees today demand more insight from me about how they can become better leaders. They want the tools and they are asking me for them. I want to serve them all better so I came to this workshop. As the leader of our organization, I wanted to provide myself with a broader framework to develop my company and employees—to improve the tools I have to augment my leadership skills, help my managers improve theirs, and maintain the culture of our company that we have worked so hard to create!

This workshop helped me differentiate concepts, like organizational culture and engagement versus employee happiness and satisfaction. I will go back understanding this model better, and redefine our vocabulary to make sure that we’re all speaking the same language and that we understand what we’re talking about.

The Denison model and the simplicity of the output is beautiful. Anybody can look at it and quickly gain some feedback without diving in deep. Obviously, there’s a lot of analytics behind all of that to make it easy, but it’s a beautiful simplicity.

Jessica Durrie
C.E.O
Small World Coffee

As a program director for acquisitions and integration activities at Omnicell—we’re an industry leader in healthcare automation and software services—I oftentimes structure and lead integration teams. Culture is a primary value driver of an integration and our ability to assess and understand the culture of an acquired business allows us to develop effective culture integration strategies.

Dan Denison’s insight and his reminder that culture is an indicator of performance was a key insight. And so was highlighting the importance not just of organizational culture, but of the leadership skills that are necessary to drive culture change. Leaders need to understand the linkage between culture and strategy, and be able to effectively describe the culture of their organization.

Having attended, I now have a much better understanding of the Denison framework and how we can leverage it for future integrations at our organization.

Mark Kirkbride
Program Director
Omnicell, Inc.

Although my degree is in Organizational Development, I spent the majority of my career in the Corporate Real Estate industry. My love of Leadership, Engagement and Community Involvement kept me focused on people and performance. Attending Denison and further understanding cultural dynamics helped me connect both spectrums around how people and culture impact the workplace. Here at the workshop, there has been a lot of thoughtful in-depth discussions. Great group of attendees, Dan, Bryan, and the Denison team were phenomenal and insightful. This was a tremendous experience.

Mark Nisbett
President
CoreNet Global
CT/Westchester Chapter

In the context of Canada’s cultural mosaic, Canadians are proud both of their citizenship and heritage. Long standing cultural norms can resonate throughout a family for generations. With a wealth of diversity across Canada, this means we interact without knowing the cultural nuances, simple or complex, that shape each other’s world. I think Canadians often have hidden characteristics and implicit bias that are uniquely complex that are unknown to others, but also to themselves.

The Denison Model is quite relevant on this front. With this proven model and global data comparisons, we can potentially get to that “difficult to uncover” information even when we’re unwittingly covering it up. This is critical to finding appropriate solutions.

Hands down, the highlight of the Denison workshop for me has been hearing from other people about those stories you can’t make up. The model is straightforward, and it should be, but it’s in the weeds that the magic happens! So, hearing people’s stories is very enlightening. You might talk for four hours and have one story shared that just blows your mind—but it was worth the four hours just to get to the story!

Juliana Trichilo Cina
Managing Director
Smart Self Solutions

I am an HR Coordinator at Meritor, a leading global supplier of drivetrain, mobility, braking and aftermarket solutions for commercial vehicle and industrial markets. As a member of the Engagement Team, I help to execute the Denison survey as well as other engagement initiatives.

Our leaders see culture as high importance at Meritor, which is why Denison is so important to us. Our leadership takes the time and effort to close any cultural gaps and consistently strives to show the impact that teams are having on the organization.

I participated in the workshop hoping to gain a more in-depth understanding of organizational culture and ways to improve it as we begin to roll out Denison throughout our organization. As participants interacted as a group, I benefited from seeing how others manage the Denison process, some of the new modules being rolled out by Denison (diversity and inclusion) and current trends for our teams to consider. I also liked the pulse survey option through the Denison-Waggl partnership. It’s a great resource to determine whether leaders’ initiatives and employees’ ideas and experiences are aligning.

Biggest takeaway? If you don’t have the mission piece of your culture well defined, you’re not going to have anything else.

Stacey Stanczak-Tuscany
HR Coordinator
Meritor