Govia Thameslink Railway
CASE STUDY | Change and Transformation / Culture DiagnosticsGTR has been committed to adapting its leadership skills to ambitious Change plans since we began working with them in 2019. We continue to support them as they overhaul a legacy culture of outdated leadership behaviours that had impacted the team’s effectiveness, cohesion, and workplace happiness.
This work formed part of GTR’s wider effort to align strategy, culture and leadership to meet increasing operational demands.
Context and Challenge
Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) was undertaking a major change and transformation programme when the leadership team recognised that outdated leadership practices were undermining collaboration, decision-making and morale. The organisation had a legacy culture that was struggling to support the pace and complexity of operational demands.
At the same time, GTR was preparing for a challenging integration with Network Rail to operate a joint control hub — a shift requiring strong cultural understanding and effective cross-organisational collaboration. Leaders needed new mindsets, behaviours and skills to create an empowered, responsive and cohesive approach across both organisations.
What Quirk did to address the challenge
Quirk ran three successful residential leadership development programmes in Brighton, focusing on managerial behaviours and their response to incidents. On top of this, Quirk installed a culture of empowerment within GTR to make junior managers and their teams more autonomous.
Delivered residential leadership programmes focused on building empowerment, confidence and improved incident response across management levels.
Embedded behavioural change through a blend of virtual and in-person workshops, using self-evaluation and co-created solutions to address systemic issues.
Conducted pre- and post-programme surveys to measure reliability, disruption response, behaviours and attitudes — providing clear evidence of leadership growth and cultural improvement.
- These changes were achieved through a mixture of virtual and face-to-face workshops. Self-evaluation was a key pillar of these sessions. Solutions to these issues were then co-created, allowing systemic leadership issues to be tackled head-on.
Key outcomes of Quirk’s work
A survey was conducted at the start and end of the workshops. The survey responses showed fundamental differences around team reliability and response to disruptions, demonstrating a genuine shift in attitudes and a clear desire to embed the long-term behaviour change.
In light of these successes, Quirk has since facilitated further sessions surrounding decisionmaking and working under pressure. These are tailored to match the exact challenges of GTR, ensuring the cultural and behavioural needs continue to be addressed.
Impact in the First 90 Days
Leaders demonstrated early behavioural shifts, including more confident decision-making and stronger ownership during operational incidents.
Teams reported better communication and improved day-to-day collaboration across management layers.
The integration work with Network Rail benefited from increased cultural awareness and more constructive cross-team interactions.
12-Month Business Impact
Directional: Significant positive movement across all measured leadership behaviours — reliability, disruption response, attitudes and confidence.
Directional: Strengthened culture of empowerment, improving morale and cohesion across teams.
Directional: Enhanced operational resilience through better distributed decision-making and clearer behavioural expectations.
Quirk’s sessions and workshops have been highly interactive and thought-provoking. Well-run and facilitated sessions have been powerful motivators in helping us change our culture and embed new behaviours to benefit everyone across our teams.
Tim McCarthy
People Development Manager, GTR
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