Evolving the CityFibre Way

How did CityFibre, an innate Challenger in the UK B2B broadband market, evolve its core values and behaviours, and rekindle its Challenger spirit, after a period of rapid growth?

Developing Future Ready Values

The UK B2B broadband market is structurally biased towards the incumbent providers. CityFibre is a classic David to the existing Goliaths and they attribute part of their early success to a deeply loved and well applied set of values and behaviours called the CityFibre Way.

In 2022, the company had enjoyed a period of rapid growth, swelling its workforce from 800 to more than 2,000 people in a couple of years. The pace of this growth, and the assimilation of so many new people, highlighted a need to revisit the CityFibre Way and evolve these values to meet the company’s new trajectory and ambitions.

Rekindling its Challenger Spirit

When the company launched in 2011, a driving motivation for CityFibre’s founder, Greg Mesch, was to challenge the status quo – in this case, the lazy duopoly responsible for the UK’s creaking digital infrastructure. This innate underdog spirit inspired the company to successfully take on the big guys and the policy environment surrounding infrastructure competition in the UK, and their actions have since helped spark an additional £25bn of private investment in the sector. Proof that CityFibre had Challenger in its DNA.

But this growth also coincided with the pandemic and 1,200 new people had been hired in a period when it was hard for them to meet and work together. Additionally, given the relatively small number of people in the broadband industry in the UK, many of the people who had newly joined CityFibre had come from the competition, in other words, from the incumbents. So, perhaps inevitably, CityFibre’s Challenger start-up spirit came face to face with people with a more entrenched way of thinking. However, Greg and his executive team did not want CityFibre to lose its entrepreneurial zeal, so a key part of this exercise was to engage with the organisation in a way that everyone could understand the meaning and importance of a Challenger Mindset.

“Our industry is almost unrecognisable from just 5 years ago and, in many ways, so is our business. We’ve grown from fledgling start-up to become one of the largest investors in the UK’s infrastructure in just a few short years. Every step of that journey has been made in defiance of the odds and of those who said it could not be done. That’s the determination of a Challenger Brand. ”

— Will Brayne, Group Director of Corporate Communications

CityFibre Way 2.0

Through a combination of dozens of stakeholder interviews, a company-wide survey, and workshops (all carefully cast to be representative of the new organisation), we were able to identify the values and behaviours from the original CityFibre Way that should endure as well as articulate the new behaviours that were fit for purpose for the company’s next chapter of growth.

We used the workshops to co-create the new CityFibre Way, adopting an engaging methodology called ‘Articles’ which is adapted from the way that crews on pirate ships would agree their common code of conduct. This technique ensured a real sense of authorship and ownership among the team and helped us capture the language that would travel best through the organisation.

In the latter stage of the project, we helped the team develop the executional plan to cascade the new CityFibre Way throughout the business and ensure that it was understandable and usable at every level.

A New Rallying Cry

The first step in the cascade programme was an all-company event entitled ‘Be More Challenger’ – an event where the new CityFibre Way was central to the agenda.

CityFibre brought the behaviours to life with their signature character and humour for more than 2,000 employees, even employing an improv team to teach ‘Can-If Thinking’ (a key methodology from our book A Beautiful Constraint) in a practical yet fun way. After the conference, they continued with the rollout to embed the CityFibre Way 2.0 across the whole organisation.

Post-script

Despite the challenging economic climate affecting so many businesses over the last 18 months, and particularly those investing billions in major infrastructure projects, CityFibre has weathered the storm and emerged stronger than ever. Greg attributes this success to the resilience and determination of the CityFibre team and that in turn, to its holding strong to its challenger ethos and the articles developed during this project.

“Ensuring you continue to think and act like a Challenger requires a clarity of purpose, behaviours, and ways of working that is signed up to by every member of the team. We call that the CityFibre Way. Our work with eatbigfish to develop, refine and embed that in our team has been not only necessary, but truly energising. It has helped us push through the tough times and build a legacy we can all be proud of.”