Culture: Leadership & High Performance
Culture is a word that gets thrown around a lot, usually in an abstract way to get some sense of what it is and isn’t. However, I’ve rarely experienced anyone provide real-world context to demonstrate what culture actually is, what creates it and it’s impact on business outcomes.
Let’s explore this now.
Culture
The model below is based on a matrix by Professor Tim Knoster, who discovered the correlation between the components of strategy and human fallout, which ultimately determine the level of success or failure in any endeavour. I’ve modified it considerably for a business context, however this is a valid model for any individual, team or organisation in pursuit of a specific outcome. This can be anything from delivering a career defining presentation to an large enterprise organisational transformation.
We can see the model demonstrates six fundamental levels to any given strategy, all of which are determined by those in leadership roles, from senior to team. Everyone else simply takes their cues from it. Leaders are responsible for creating the organisational vision, setting a mission, and so on, proving that culture is created at the top, cascading downhill. These six levels essentially combine to form the blueprint of your culture, from a small team to an entire organisation.
Let me give you an example:
One of my more recent projects was being asked to support a public sector organisation in the world of outdoor education with the goal of achieving a culture reset.
Outdoor education, in this context, is about developing social skills and critical thinking in young people through outdoor activities, such as sailing, mountain biking and so on. In the organisation I was supporting they specifically offer Residential Programs, Duke of Edinburgh Programs, Inner City Programs and 1:1 Programs for troubled teens in the social care system.
They had collectively spent 2+years during lockdown attempting to stay relevant, adapting their offering to school playgrounds all while fighting off an internal local government political campaign to close them down. Weary, battered and somewhat disconnected they made it to the other side.
Performance
The model below is based on a matrix created by Professor of Psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who was first to formally investigate the traits associated with high performance, which he collectively called Flow. I have modified it for a business context to correlate organisational states of being with culture by looking at the relationship between Challenge, defined as: Degree of difficulty to be overcome, and Support, defined as: Available resources. To determine the culture you operate you will witness one of the following:
Anxiety: Missed deadlines, avoidance of interaction, likely negatively impacting employee sickness absence.
Apathy: Absence of enthusiasm or presence of indifference, likely negatively impacting employee retention.
Comfort: Lack of activity and accountability, likely negatively impacting employee productivity.
Flow: Pro-active, self-directed, emphasis on personal responsibility, likely positively impacting all of the above.
Based on what we have learned so far we can see that a leaders ability to form a cohesive strategy, present it to their people and guide them through it day to day determines which of the four types of culture above will present. If you want to learn more about the impact of leadership styles on organisational culture and business outcomes then please do check out: Leadership: Styles, Cause & Effect.
In our example many team members had reached a point of burnout, not sure if they were actually still providing a quality service to the schools and young people they supported. Working remotely in isolation for long periods of time, while simultaneously adapting to significant change under the threat of redundancy had taken their toll. In general this had an impact on the teams confidence, tipping them in to Anxiety.
The Director wanted to draw a line in the sand for everyone in his charge by reconnecting with their purpose and each other. To cut a long story short, we reflected on their achievements, re-established their Vision, Mission and Identity, redefined their values and figured out a way to bring it all to life, i.e. We defined their culture.
Ways of Working
Below is the Flow quadrant enlarged so we can see the relationship between the various components of culture. You’ll see the thread that links each component is Ways of Working, i.e. How an organisation agrees to do things.
Very quickly we can see this model reinforces that a healthy high performance culture must have congruence in all the levels of strategy mentioned at the beginning, each component informing the next as they cascade from abstraction to action.
To continue with our example: After much cognitive dissonance we arrived at the elegant solution of Peer Based Coaching. For all the perceived complexity of the issues we leaned in to it all came down to embedding space to have conversations with each other as part of their working week that lifts them up, in terms of professionalism and customer experience.
This single solution, that leveraged an action orientated feedback model I teach, led to a new hand-over process between shifts in the residential team, improving support for the young people in their charge. A new Peer Review process ensured each team member received objective feedback on their session planning and delivery to implement improvements, re-establishing self confidence and resulted in existing weekend residential courses being re-written to reflect market need. A new weekly round up of the weeks events led to operational process improvements being highlighted and adopted, particularly around site and equipment maintenance. They experienced an organisational wide performance step change in the direction of operational excellence to the degree that output from our work formed the basis of their 2021/2022 impact study, presented to the Local Authority Directorate and Elected Council Members. In fact, at their 12 month check-in I discovered the change in process for the daily shift hand-over alone has resulted in each team member recovering 125 hrs of unpaid time each year, 2500 hrs across the entire team. Put another way the equivalent of 3 full working weeks for each person.
A complete culture reset, and all it took was one senior leader to set all this in motion.
Conclusion
Culture, in a nutshell, is how an individual, team or organisation agrees to do things. A social contract in a professional setting. Any given leader, from team to senior, bares the responsibility of demonstrating the right way to work on the right things at the right time for a common cause. It’s really that simple. Without this as your foundation everything else is just window dressing.
So how might you proceed to check you are setting the right example to those around you?
Determine when and how you tip in and out of the 4 different quadrants.
Ask those around you for feedback to catch your blindspots.
Take note of what you are doing well.
Take note of what needs work.
Set some next steps to up your game accordingly.
Repeat.
If you would benefit from support to set your culture rest or cultural transformation up for success, or get an ongoing cultural transformation back on track, ensuring you take a strategic approach, then please do schedule a call with me by putting a 60mins in my diary at a time that suits you. We can discuss your situation and options over an eCoffee.
Best Wishes
Kenny
