High Performance Culture : Value-Add Focused Strategy
The Challenge
Are you passionate about business performance and employee experience? Companies can create culture more effectively by balancing an action-oriented approach with investments in a shared vision.
Workplace culture initiatives that are evidenced through posters and once a year surveys are perceived poorly by employees and deliver little value. Stagnation and increased sarcasm are typical outcomes. "52% of employees currently believe their company’s efforts to be empathetic toward staff are dishonest" - 2023 Ernst & Young LLP. Below are three reasons for why culture initiatives, even if well-intended, often fail to achieve real outcomes.
Issue #1: Motherly statements
- The topic of workplace culture is often amorphous, as it is advertised and viewed through the prism of very general topics - such an approach fails to define tangible outcomes that are easy to achieve in short timeframes.
Issue #2: Lack of buy-in, accountability and democratised transparency
- Workplace values are commonly communicated top-down - neither periodic checking nor coaching can win hearts and minds.
Issue #3: Lacklustre approach to evidence
- If culture initiative is announced without building psychological safety and creating patterns for critical thinking, then collection and measurement of evidence is going to produce low quality data.
- Traditional surveys are a poor mechanism for going-concern initiatives due to the lag time and the fact that up to 50% of people lie when answering surveys.
- Survey-based feedback mechanisms fail to account for neurodiverse ways of engaging employees.
Key leadership mistake
- Leaders often make a mistake by thinking that culture is not the biggest issue to be tackled, relative to other challenges. This mindset overlooks the fact that culture is behaviours. Behaviours are habits that represent drag and resignation. Many leaders overestimate personal ability, and usefulness of confidants, in measuring the invisible lack of trust.
- One cannot achieve higher performance and better outcomes with drag embedded into business as usual. The efficiency coefficient of solving something is low when there is no ability to touch culture and the system. If low performance is the accepted norm, then the process of losing people's hearts and minds is akin to a snowball effect.
How to build workplace culture with real outcomes
Culture development does not need to be boring and can deliver appreciable value within a reasonably short time.
Employees often see culture initiatives through the prism of the three issues outlined above. When people see posters on the walls, they often see the overall challenge because day-to-day challenges are too far removed from good but potentially impotent values.
The alternative to this traditional approach is something called the “dilemma-tested approach” that is explained by
Erin Meyer in "Build a Corporate Culture That Works":
- This approach is about incremental and practical changes that people can associate to very specific issues and easily measures the improved outcomes.
- The practical changes are not tagged against generic values. Instead they are tagged against a small and specific “dilemma”.
Let's take accountability or trust as an example. "If trust is a must have - get specific. Rather than rambling generally about trustworthiness and using the word trust, we need to point to specific behaviours, we need to point precisely to where the breach lies. The more exact we can be the more likely it is that people can hear us, that we can give feedback on behaviour and stay away form character, and that we can support a real change" - Brené Brown, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
Examples of incremental and practical dilemmas:
| Dilemma | Relationship to team-wide traits and culture |
|---|---|
| Client experience is negatively impacted due to stale information in our documentation, as a result our client facing team is not as empowered. | There may be issues in the organisation with collaboration, accountability, teaming, ability to speak up / be heard and even innovation. |
| Management reporting team suffers from a crunch time every month due to accounts payable team not having capacity to clear the backlog. | There may be issues in the organisation with accountability. In this case team leads or senior management may be ignoring the process flow and issues experienced by both teams. |
When an organisation faces challenges, communicating top-down culture values with the expectation that this improves specific experiences is the wrong approach. This strategy results in poor buy-in and weak overall culture.
The “dilemmas-driven” strategy flips the focus by:
- Energising the team(s) to resolve specific issues that improve business process performance, team’s and client’s experience.
- Focusing on sustainable outcomes as a capability that are easy to evidence and do not need generic posters on the walls.
- Optimising work of management and employees - team-wide traits are purposefully "forged in the fire" of existing processes without new overheads and motherly statements.
The “dilemmas-tested” method to culture development is:
- Create a backlog of dilemmas - this is best achieved through an existing continuous process improvement campaign, as most organizations already periodically review what can be improved.
- Test each dilemma - if it is too big or complex, break it down into smaller dilemmas.
- Prioritise the dilemma backlog and ensure that outcomes are easily measurable and can be experienced by the team in a reasonable timeframe.
- Work on each dilemma as part of the continuous improvements drive.
- Continuously refine and prioritise the backlog of dilemmas.
To sum up
In the “dilemmas-tested” method, culture is a result of changes and not the other way around. Such strategy achieves five key sustainability outcomes:
- Business and decision-making processes are continuously refined for performance and positive experience for all stakeholders (executives, employees, clients, partners).
- Team-wide traits are a result of iron-making business processes that achieve performance, as opposed to traits that are communicated top-down.
- Managers, as well as grassroots employees, focus their time optimally on performance of the business and teams
- Senior leaders and organisational designers are empowered to make value-based decisions because solving each dilemmas is easy to evidence to through specific benefits and outcomes.
- The process of discovering and resolving dilemmas provides a stream of insights that, when triangulated, provide a bigger picture that opens paths to larger goals and better strategy.
The secret to orchestrating great culture
- There is no need to define a north star vision or generic aspirations. Just focus on practical dilemmas.
- Culture is a process of evolution and not a process of adherence to some commandments.
- DNA of sustainable culture is formed through teaming when solving specific dilemmas, measuring outcomes honestly and learning.
Leaders sometimes choose to continue shovelling coal into the dirty steam engine under the pretence of “we need to move forward”. This behaviour is based on a view that “yes, I would love to have electrified railway tracks, but it is a bigger challenge for future”. A “specific dilemmas backlog” approach is the bridge between what is practical and the aspirational dream of being exceptional.
The journey towards the “exceptional team” state requires
re-invention and maturity growth that never stops.
Next steps
Our next article provides a practical example of implementing a dilemma-tested strategy - read more here.
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