When your culture drives the right behaviors, results will improve, guaranteed.
- Your current culture is probably valuing the wrong things, like competing silos, fear of change, and ineffective information flow.
- You didn’t create those patterns on purpose, but they are there, and they are impeding performance.
- When you target your change on those areas of collaboration, agility, and transparency, you’ll see both morale and performance improve. This is precisely what we do in our culture design work.
THE DETAILS:
Culture is like the water a fish swims in—it’s all around you, and you don’t have a good sense of how much it impacts your health and well-being as an organization. All cultures values things like collaboration, agility, and transparency, but leaders often don’t realize that the culture has hidden patterns in those areas that hold the organization back.
FOR EXAMPLE:
One of our clients did a culture assessment with us and it confirmed that they had some dangerous patterns around collaboration and transparency. So we worked with them to develop specific action items that would address the patterns, including developing guidelines for conflict conversations, implementing a system for identifying decision-making roles within projects, and developing some new KPIs for the organization to help with transparency.
Within a year they saw noticeable productivity gains. “We just completed 3 major projects in the last cycle, all under budget, and all ahead of schedule,” said their CEO, who felt that kind of performance would have been impossible in the previous culture. He also noticed that the entire staff dealt easily and quickly with a major breakdown in their member database, including providing some tough answers to their governing board. In the past, that challenge would have produced a lot of stress, delayed reactions, and avoidance of tough issues, but this time they moved through it with ease and speed, freeing them up to get moving on other issues.
When your culture drives the right behaviors, results will improve, guaranteed.
- Explore how our culture assessment, culture design, and culture change coaching can help you improve results.