How do I Build a High-Performance Culture

How do I Build a High-Performance Culture ?

This was a question I have been asked over and over again, by prospective employers and other buisness leaders, and it is a fundemental bed rock for an early stage company, you need to have developing a lean and hungry culture in the organisation, all parts of the company need to be a focused entity, all driven with the same objective in plain view. I have a friend who started a "charity" shop and is opening another shop soon, and what I say here is the same for him as it does for us more mercinary buisness leaders. Let me know what you think...

Being a great buisness leader is about more than earning a profit. It's about empowerment, about forging a strong culture, and all those other buzzwords. We're all willing to agree to this--hypothetically. But when the chips are down, we start to see conflicts between those ideas and our drive to improve the bottom line. We feel compelled to make a choice between doing the "right thing" and profit, and we inevitably pick profit. We dispense with the perks and free lunches, and start to browbeat employees into greater productivity. We respond to external threats by locking down and cutting back.

However, research has shown that those "extras" that we dispense with so quickly, albeit regretfully, are the very things that will lead directly to the specific results we need. Research has shown that organizational culture directly impacts the bottom line.

This all sounds very warm and fuzzy, I know, but this is not a subtle correlation--it's a strong, undeniable one. It is real and it's nothing new. Good research shows that financially stronger companies--defined as those with an ROI of 30 percent or higher--are also strong in key, measurable aspects of corporate culture. On the other hand, financially weaker companies--those with an ROI of 9 percent or lower--score low on those same measurements of culture.

Let's take a look at how leaders can build the kind of culture that correlates to the performance they want.

According to the Denison model--a model of corporate culture that addresses these issues--there are four interwoven corporate culture traits:

Mission, which defines the long-term direction and purpose of the organization

Involvement, which measures the company's ability to drive commitment and to develop ownership with employees

Consistency, which defines the values, agreement and coordination that hold the company together

Adaptability, which measures the company's ability to read and scan the business environment and to respond to change

Companies that are strong in Adaptability and Involvement have an edge in innovation and creativity, while companies excelling in Mission and Consistency have a high measure of stability, return on investment and return on sales. Companies measuring high in all components have a dramatic financial advantage over organizations that are weak in these areas. Companies at the bottom perform just as you'd expect: They're sluggish, wasteful and out of touch with their customers.

How does this look in practice?

A telecommunications company looks at its organizational culture in an effort to align it with its business strategy. It competed head to head with larger companies, so it chose the strategy of being first to the market with innovative products and services. The chief executive knew he could not personally cause the needed innovation, but he could help create a culture and lead his managers in a way that would foster innovation--a culture that encouraged the traits of Adaptability and Involvement. After a while, the company began to surprise the competition by bringing to market a string of innovative products and services. It captured market share and grew sales and, because it was first to market with innovations, it was able to command a higher price for its products and services.

In another situation, a successful manufacturing business and its CEO were well known for creativity and innovation, but it wasn't achieving the financial results it wanted. Through an evaluation of its culture, the company found that employees didn't have a consistent sense of the mission of the organization. Many of the engineers were acting as autonomous engineers in accepting projects whose completion would give them great personal and professional satisfaction, but little revenue for the company. After the company took steps to strengthen the employees' understanding of Mission and Consistency, engineers began turning away some business opportunities as being off-purpose. As a result, costs declined and the company reported a better return on assets than it had achieved before.

What's your situation? Is your company growing or established? Does it compete on price or on innovation? Is your industry mature and stable, or new and evolving? With those questions in mind, answer this: What are the components of culture that you need to encourage in your organization to build a performance culture and how will you do it?

Once you have these answers, really commit to their implementation. Any change that isn't permanent and pervasive won't do it. It's got to be real. It's got to become part of the air your employees breathe. Once they've accepted the change as a part of their daily lives, and they're confident that it will continue, then you'll start to see the improvements in performance--however you define it

Slainte
Gordon

Can the military teach us anything useful

Some take aways from a lecture by When the United States Military Academy at West Point got its new Superintendent in June, it got a straight-talking three-star general with oodles of political experience, fresh from the front.
Lt. General Franklin L. Hagenbeck was in Afghanistan as the Commander, Coalition Joint Task Force Mountain, for Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Anaconda. He dealt directly, though apparently unenthusiastically, with the local "ruthless war lords."
"Excuse me," he corrects himself, "the Secretary of Defense reminds me that we are not to refer publicly to these men as war lords. They are 'provincial governors.'"
Hagenbeck takes the reins of the storied military college known as West Point at a time when the spectre of an increasingly unpopular war hangs over the nation, if not its military academy, more than the spirit of a post-September 11th patriotism.
For his part, Hagenbeck reacts viscerally to the suggestion that terrorism remains a threat to the Western world. "These people are by no means done with us," he exclaims. "They are unbelievably vicious. You can't imagine what they do to women and children," he says.
With fire in his belly, Hagenbeck assumes the helm of his alma mater. A surprise, he muses, to himself and surely to his mates from the class of 1971. And that's probably true. While Hagenbeck has managed to amass an impressive Army command résumé, his academic pursuits leaned more toward gridiron than scholastic. He pursued and earned a masters degree in exercise physiology from Florida State. (Though the Army did later send him for an MBA from Long Island University.)
Despite a mandate to be a change agent at a venerable 204 year old institution (a place where students come to learn lessons of history forged by the school's former students), Hagenbeck made an interesting promise to the staff and students of West Point. "I promised I would make no major changes except in matters of safety," to give us adequate time to assess what needs to be done "to make the right changes so that West Point remains relevant and ready" for meeting the nation's challenges.
General Take-Aways
In taking key leadership lessons from his military career, General Hagenbeck crystallizes (with a little editorial help from your correspondent) a few that are relevant to a leader in any walk of life.

Develop Personal Relationships with Key Constituents. Whether your career depends on Congress, the media, or the "global community" — as his has — or representatives of other important groups, develop personal relationships with people in a position to influence your agenda (and career).

Pay Attention to the Care and Feeding of Your Boss. "That doesn't mean 'brown nosing' your boss," Hagenbeck bluntly says. "It does mean, know what they want and how they want to be kept informed." Hagenbeck has worked for many bosses in his 35 year career, including two former Chiefs of the Joint Staff, Generals Hugh Shelton and Richard Meyer.
"Understand the critical information requirements of your boss," Hagenbeck advises. "Know why your boss would want you to wake them at three in the morning to tell them something. It differs by individual boss in the same job."

Get Feedback. Leaders give feedback but they need to receive it, too. The Army calls it "counseling." And it is increasingly part of the organization's culture.
Good leaders, Hagenbeck says, are clear when they are providing counseling to their reports ("I'm counseling you about this…" Or, "This is a counseling session about…"), and they make sure they receive counseling to improve performance.

Stay Calm Under All Conditions. "A senior leader should be like a duck on a pond. Even if your feet are paddling a thousand miles an hour, you should appear to those around you to be calm under all conditions."

You can't inspire confidence in others, Hagenbeck warns, if you appear to have lost your cool. So, you need to trust others to do their job. Which means, of course, that you've developed good people capable of doing their work.

Prepare People to Do Good Work. "A good unit does routine things routinely," is a common Armyism Hagenbeck says. It means that a well-trained, well-equipped group of competent people doesn't need managerial intervention to do its job.

When a manager can leave people alone to do their work, it frees the leader to do higher value stuff, Hagenbeck says.
Manage to Standards and Heed Those Standards. Good work depends on having clear standards and managing to them, sure. But it also means, Hagenbeck says, not exceeding the standards on your own volition.

He tells stories about when individual officers, thinking they were doing a good thing, pushed performance beyond specified levels. "There were unintended consequences," Hagenbeck says. "If you want higher levels of performance, change the standards using a process."

Honor the Ethics Code Even When It's Hard. West Point cadets live by a simple Code of Honor: A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do.
Guess which is the hardest part of that Code? The "tolerate" part. It means, Hagenbeck says, that a cadet who did not participate in dishonorable behavior may be wrestling with his conscience about tattling on a buddy who did. But that's the point.

"Our Code of Honor rests on a glass wall," Hagenbeck observes. "One crack and the whole thing comes tumbling down."
To both encourage cadets to "do the right thing" and keep the system workable, Hagenbeck is afforded some latitude in how he exacts punishments for violations to the Code. He can — and just weeks into his job, already has — outright expel violators from the prestigious academy. Or, for the lapse in judgment, a cadet could be punished by having his or her graduation delayed by six months. Hagenbeck can also force a cadet to repeat an entire academic year of studies for an infraction.

So what do you think? does the military teach us anything useful or is it the what makes a good leader can be applied universally ? Recruiters and HR profesionals take note .....

Slainte

Gordon