CASE STUDIES / INTERSCOPE & UNIVERSAL MUSIC
CASE STUDY · MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT · GLOBAL
One Town Hall Became A Three-Year Program. Then The Parent Company Called.
Interscope Geffen A&M
Santa Monica, California
Universal Music Group
Corporate HR · Talent Acquisition
They brought us in for a single conversation nobody at the label had held before. It became a training program running through every level of the organization, and a second engagement with the parent company’s corporate HR team.
SECTOR
Music & entertainment · Global recorded music
PROFILE
Major label group within a global music company
ENGAGEMENT
Multi-year program, 2020–2022
SERVICES
Executive advisory · Town hall facilitation · Org-wide training · Measurement advisory
IN BRIEF
What Changed.
In 2020, a major label group inside one of the world’s largest music companies decided to hold a conversation with its employees about race and belonging. Nobody there had run one before, and the risk of getting it wrong was real.
They hired us to make that conversation work. What followed ran for the next three years.
A single town hall grew into a multi-topic training program spanning three years.
Every topic ran from the CEO and executive team down to the full employee population.
The work spread laterally, and the parent company’s corporate HR team engaged us independently.
THE CHALLENGE
A Company Built On Culture, About To Talk About Its Own.
In the summer of 2020, employees across the music industry were asking their leadership questions that had not been asked out loud before. About representation, about who gets heard, about whether it was safe to raise any of it at all.
The label group’s leadership wanted to hold that conversation rather than issue a statement about it. That is a harder thing to do well. A town hall on race can build trust or destroy it depending almost entirely on how the room is opened and whether people believe there will be consequences for speaking.
The brief was not a training session. It was to make it safe for a company to hear something it might not want to hear, and then to do something with what it heard.
THE APPROACH
Prepare The Leader. Open The Room. Then Build The Program.
The order mattered more than any individual session.
We prepare the leader before we prepare the room.
Before the town hall, we worked directly with the label group’s chief executive on how to open it. How to set the purpose, how to make the terms of safety explicit, and why leading with his own learning would lower the barrier for everyone else. Employees decide within the first few minutes whether a session like this is genuine, and that decision is made by the person who speaks first.
01
We facilitate the conversation, then report what was actually said.
We facilitated the town hall and followed it with an executive summary of the findings for the leadership team. Employees raised more than the session could hold, including questions about whether it was safe to ask questions at all. Those went back to leadership rather than into a drawer.
02
We turn a moment into a program.
A single event does not change how an organization behaves. Over the following quarters we built the work into a sequence of company-wide topics, each building on the last and each scheduled far enough apart that the previous one had time to land.
03
We run every topic through every level.
Each topic began with the chief executive and his leadership team, then ran again for people managers, then again for the full employee population across multiple sessions. Same subject, different rooms. Employees who had watched their executives go first were considerably more willing to engage than employees told to attend a training.
04
We help you decide how to measure it.
As the program matured, the client brought us into the design of their own employee listening work, moving the relationship from delivering sessions to advising on how the organization asks its people questions and what it does with the answers.
05
WHAT MOVED
The Clearest Measure Of The Work Is What They Did Next.
We do not publish engagement metrics from this client. What we can tell you is how the scope moved, and scope only moves in one direction when the work is landing.
STARTED AS
One event became a three-year program.
The initial brief was a single town hall. The relationship ran across four distinct company-wide topics through 2022.
STARTED WITH
The executive team became the whole company.
What began in the CEO’s room was repeated for people managers and then for the full employee population, topic after topic.
STARTED INSIDE
One label group became the parent company.
Corporate HR at the parent company engaged TMS independently for its global Talent Acquisition team, on a referral from inside the label.
The third of those is the one worth pausing on. We did not pitch the parent company. Two mid-level HR colleagues who had seen the label work described it to a director in corporate learning and development, who reached out directly. Trust travelled sideways through an organization of tens of thousands of people, on the strength of the work alone.
“I was so pleased to see the level of engagement and participation. I got some really great feedback, all was positive. And I had a couple of employees say that they could listen to you speak all day long… I wouldn’t do anything differently go-forward.”
Vice President, Human Resources
Interscope Geffen A&M
THE OUTCOME
A Conversation They Can Now Have Without Us.
Over three years the organization moved from having never held a conversation like this to running one as a matter of course, with its executives going first, its managers equipped to continue it, and its own listening mechanisms designed to keep asking.
The parent company engagement is the part that says the most. Referrals inside a company of that size do not happen because a session went pleasantly. They happen when someone is willing to attach their own credibility to recommending you.
In an industry that sells culture to the rest of the world, this work was about whether the culture inside the building could stand the same scrutiny. If that question is live for you, it is the one we would start with.
MORE PROOF
What Changed After We Left.
Retention
NONPROFIT · DISABILITY SERVICES
In a sector built on turnover, more of Las Trampas’ people plan to stay.
Representation
REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT
Head office thought the message had landed. The field said otherwise.
Culture
MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT