Business success is often to attributed to a Performance Culture, distinguished by innovation, agility, collaboration, and transparency. So how do we get there from a culture of complacency, misaligned priorities, unclear accountability, and high job turnover?
For an organization to improve performance, its people must work differently.
- Watch your thoughts, they become words
- Watch your words, they become actions
- Watch your actions, they become habits
- Watch your habits, they become character
- Watch your character it becomes your destiny
~ Frank Outlaw, President of Bi-Lo Stores in 1960’s South Carolina
The levers of Culture are as intuitive as Outlaw’s levers of Character
How can you tell if your culture is working? By understanding how the levers are working:
IDENTITY. What is your organization’s mission, your values, your vision for the future? If you ask different people (even different leaders) you may get very different answers, which can distort decision-making and work performance in every corner of your business.
COMMUNICATION. Does everyone know your mission and vision? Do they understand where we are in the journey? If not, they can’t align their efforts with your strategic direction. Your intentions can be routinely contradicted in the field, whether they mean to or not.
IMPROVEMENT. Are you taking concrete steps to implement your vision, or just living hand to mouth? Are you solving real problems that you actually have, or distracting yourself with management fads? Is everyone participating, or is it just some “crack” team toiling away in isolation? Unless everyone is involved, you are not impacting culture.
STANDARDS. Have you adopted reliable processes for high-impact activity, that you can track with real-time performance metrics? Or is performance driven by the personalities of people in each role, who change every shift, every promotion, every vacation, every absence or attrition? When we don’t have reliable standards for the things that matter, work requires more attention and coordination, putting performance at risk.
CULTURE. Have the critical behaviors become automatic, like brushing your teeth in the morning, or are you still coaxing people to do the right thing? Are hourly associates thinking like business people, and are leaders a visible part of the team?
PERFORMANCE. Are you seeing a sustainable benefit from aligning your organization through transparency and targeted problem solving? Whether yes or no, you must continue to make course corrections as a team, since change is all around us and there is no finish line.
You can get there from here
Culture abhors a vacuum. If you’re not creating the culture you want, then the rumor mill will create one for you.
It can be tempting to start from the beginning (Mission) and work straight toward Performance. Some companies spend a year crafting a vision, and then another year communicating it to the field, before taking concrete steps to implement. By that time, their leadership team may have changed, along with their vision and values.
The good news is that “culturistics” overlap, and much of the work can be done in parallel. If you develop your vision with participation from your team, you have already begun communicating it. If you develop standards during cross-functional problem solving, your people need less coaxing to adopt those same standards (that they set for themselves).
While culture is not handed down on tablets from the mountaintop, leaders play a critical role in aligning their organizations through a shared culture. By understanding and managing the levers of culture, you can proactively build the culture that makes for successful performance in your business.
© Adaptation Management Consulting LLC
Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra concert in Tianjin, courtesy of wikimedia commons
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