Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM stated ‘I came to see in my time at IBM that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game.’ Wise words indeed and sums up why culture is now a priority for most CEOs, MDs, Exec Teams, Team Leaders, HR specialists, and more often than not, it finds itself included in the CEO scorecard. (Do read to the end and why not complete the Capitalise Culture Health Check to gain some high-level insight relating to your company culture.)
Everyone’s looking for the ‘game, set and match – it’s in the bag’ scenario, however, few are getting the slam dunk! There seems, however, to be a dichotomy going on in the workplace. When it comes to culture, a high number of Boards/CEOs agree (92% in fact - E&Y Culture & Boards at a Glance 2016) that focusing on culture has improved financial performance, however, the stats repeatedly dictate that the majority of culture transformation/ change programmes do not get properly approached and measured and therefore fail.
Take heed if you are in a people leader role as creating high performing, healthy company and team cultures are of equal importance. To be effective, any change management or culture transformation process should focus on the whole system, not just part of it. To assess how well your culture change process is going, three types of performance indicators are crucial to identify:
Output indicators – factors that related to the delivery of products and services such as productivity, efficiency and quality.
Outcome indicators – factors that relate to goals such as income, sales, new clients, repeat business.
Causal indicators – the factors that relate to cultural toxicity/entropy and cultural health, values alignment and purpose/vision alignment, which are the factors that influence colleague engagement.
The first two indicators are tangible and can be relatively easy to measure, whilst the causal indicators are subjective and aren’t easy to determine or measure. The latter has a major knock-on effect on the former two.
Performance is influenced by culture, culture is influenced by values and behaviours, and behaviours are influenced by motivations. I inherently believe that most of us are motivated to come in to work to do the best job we can, but we’re complex beings and a multiple of different aspects can take us ‘off piste’ into the land of unproductivity, conflict, frustration and resentment, a land we all want to try and avoid.
Leaders are the drivers of change, whether it’s cultural change or not. Culture change requires a shift in the values and beliefs of leaders and managers. When people leaders engage in caring and trusting behaviours, and encourage colleagues to be responsible and accountable for their work, engagement increases. So the fact that people leaders are responsible for driving healthy, high-performing cultures collectively and individually, it may be beneficial to answer the following questions…
Do you feel that the leaders in your company are highly focused culture vultures?
Are the leaders skilled in the art of culture change and bringing out the best in themselves and their teams, to deliver the company’s purpose, vision and strategy?
Just a minor, but positive shift in a team of leaders and their approach, can bring about a step change in overall company performance which positively hits the bottom line. However, if your answer is ‘no’ to the above two questions, you must ask yourself:
How high is your cultural entropy (toxicity)?
How at risk is your business because of this cultural toxicity?
I’ve been working with a number of companies recently to help them answer these two questions and I’m just about to start another round of team high-performance culture interventions with some leaders and their wider teams. These workshops will tackle the core themes and areas of cultural entropy identified from the Culture Values Assessment (CVA) results, as well as focusing on creating team and individual understanding and meaning and then getting them to set objectives to ensure alignment with the bigger picture purpose, vision and values.
It’s motivating work for all involved, including myself. There’s nothing like seeing the dial move, light bulb moments occur and clear action plans created, honed and committed to. Creating understanding and meaning and interconnecting them to the bigger picture purpose is not only motivating work for those involved, but helps to bring around the desired long-term behaviour change required.
If you want to get closer to winning the culture game and feel you need a helping hand, do get in touch. You may not know where you sit on the culture journey, and if not, why don’t you complete my short, freebie, high-level Capitalise Culture Health Check which appears under the resources section of this website.