Creating a culture of high performance

 Creating a culture of high performance

Have you ever met a company that delivers amazing results all the time? Do you know people who say they love their job and they love the people they work with? Have you ever wanted to build such an organization?

In this article, we'll talk about how to set the direction for your organization, how to create a culture of effective employee collaboration, how to organize a team to support the created culture, how to manage performance and adhere to a culture of high performance every day.

Building a culture of high performance

A culture of high performance is a culture in which people achieve results through the right behavior. They have incorporated this behavior into their daily lives. People from high performance cultures require less supervision. They are empowered to achieve goals consistent with the direction of the organization.

As a leader, you must understand how to create a high-performing culture, as well as your responsibility to implement it. We have identified six components for creating a high-performance culture:

• First, you must define the culture. What is high efficiency? What is the desired behavior? How do you know you've reached a high performance culture?
• Second, set a direction. What is the organization's vision? What is the purpose of the organization? You should be able to articulate this in front of the team.
• Third, interaction. What means and methods of communication are you going to use to strengthen the culture day by day?
• Fourth, how will you create teams ? What processes are you going to put in place to recruit and develop talent?
• Fifth, performance management. What are the goals of the organization? How are you going to measure people's performance? How to create the right behavioral incentives?

• Sixth, the need to adhere to the culture you have developed on a daily basis. How are you going to control and provide feedback to people in order to reinforce the desired behavior and get rid of the behavior that is contrary to the culture you are trying to create?

Remember that by strengthening the culture, the likelihood of better results increases and productivity increases. But it is also worth remembering about the reverse dynamics. Bad behavior breeds bad work, which leads to more bad behavior and ultimately a bad culture.

Assessing your current culture gives you an understanding of the starting point of your path to building a high performance culture. This assessment includes an assessment of what your current culture means, how people behave, and what leverage you have to incentivize behavior. Determining whether people behave in accordance with your culture or, conversely, refuse to follow it, is an important element in assessing your culture.

Let's see what goes into one of these cultural assessments. You need to ask yourself a few questions:

1. Which description best explains your culture? Get answers from senior executives, managers and other leaders, do they agree with the description? If it doesn't, you may have a culture problem.
2. Is the direction of the organization clear? Do people know how this direction relates to the culture you are trying to create?
3. Are goals and expectations clear? Does the culture support these goals?
4. What channels of communication exist to discuss and strengthen the culture? Are you using these channels effectively?
5. What processes are in place to support and strengthen the culture? Are these processes efficient? What processes or platform do you lack to stimulate culture?
6. What kind of human behavior is culturally appropriate, and what is incompatible? Are motivations for positive behavior related to culture? Are there consequences for negative behavior?

After you pass this culture assessment, you will have a clearer idea of ​​where you should start and where are the key gaps that you need to address in order to create a high performance culture.

To create a culture of high performance, you must define what high performance is. How are you going to measure it? How much does your definition depend on hard business metrics like sales, profitability and growth versus qualitative metrics like morale, engagement and customer satisfaction?

How you define and measure performance will determine the methods you use to achieve it. If you define performance in terms of hard business metrics, you'll get behavior driven by those metrics. This does not always give the desired result in terms of building a high performance culture.

Ultimately, the focus should be on quality. If it's driven by behavior and soft metrics like engagement, retention, morale, and customer satisfaction, then you'll get that behavior. And "hard" metrics like sales and profits will follow.

Here's an example for you. In one well-known organization, high performance was defined as sales and customer retention. These were two tough metrics focused on business results. Sales reps and branch managers focused on these metrics and didn't waste time on training and development . They didn't invest in anything that would take time away from sales and customer retention. The culture they created was like a grinder.

The best employees soon ran out of steam. They had been pushed so hard to achieve those sales figures that it no longer motivated them. The remaining people had a negative impact on the culture of the company. This damaged morale. It was not a high performance culture.

How you define high performance will determine behavior. So be mindful of the metrics you want to follow, because the behavior will follow those metrics.

Setting the direction for a culture of high performance

The vision and mission of the organization determine the direction. They have a direct impact on the type of culture you are going to choose for yourself. The vision and mission must be compelling, compelling, and give the team a clear understanding of the behavior required to realize the mission and vision itself.

The more meaningful the vision and mission are, the more they can be used to build and strengthen your culture. You can read more specifically about this topic in our article “Strategic planning. Practical steps to find promising projects" .

One important thing you need to do is link your goal to your culture. Your mission is your purpose, it explains why the organization exists and how it contributes to the world. The culture you create contributes to your mission.

A culture of high performance means that your vision and mission is an ideal or goal that people can realize. Sometimes this is determined by your position in relation to competitors or financial performance, but these do not affect the culture.

The right vision and mission describes what you do for clients. They may even concern the organization's contribution to society itself. Employees need to be explained how the culture they are creating relates to the mission they are trying to accomplish.

Now try to think about your vision and your mission. Look at each element separately. How each element relates to the culture you are trying to create. If the communication is clear, then you can arrange a meeting with the team to lay out your vision and mission. If you can't find a connection, it might be time to reformulate your vision and mission.

An organization's strategy is the set of initiatives and actions you will take to realize your vision. These activities and overall strategy should support the high performance culture you are trying to create.

Choosing initiatives that fit this culture or reinforce an existing one helps people become enthusiastic about the work they do. They know why their particular project is a great idea both in terms of business results and how it benefits the culture you are creating.

As a leader, you must show the relationship between the projects people work on and the culture you create. You must pass them through a strategic filter to select appropriate initiatives. This means that you will have criteria for selecting a project and deciding whether a given project follows your strategy or not.

Using the strategic filter, you ask the following question: "Does this project fit the culture we are trying to create?" If so, then people understand the connection. If it isn't, you probably shouldn't be doing this project.

Take a look at your strategic plan. What initiatives are you pursuing? How are they related to culture? Do your teams understand this connection between the initiative and the culture you are trying to create? If not, please explain the connection. If this initiative doesn't fit with the culture you're trying to create, you should probably stop running it.

The more you can tie your strategy to building a high performance culture, the more motivated your employees will be to implement these initiatives, and the faster you will build the culture you care about.

Cultural Improvement Actions

If culture is the sum of our daily actions, then people and teams are the true driving forces of culture. The people you choose to lead, the people you promote, and the way you organize teams and who you decide to hire all speak clearly to your culture. Compliance with the culture of the organization should be an evaluation criterion when choosing managers or employees.

1. Choosing a Leadership Role. When choosing someone to lead, evaluate their previous efforts and how they have strengthened or weakened the culture. Have the willpower to turn down candidates who get results but don't follow your culture. For promotion, make culture the criterion of choice. When you do this, people will realize that cultural fit clearly leads to promotions.
2. During the hiring process, when you are discussing a candidate, clearly discuss their cultural background. If there is serious doubt about this suitability, refuse to hire this candidate, no matter how strong his reputation is elsewhere.
3. When you are working on team structure, consider team composition as it is related to culture. Mix experienced workers with new team members. Having these strong performers working alongside people who don't yet know the culture, or people who don't fit the culture, can accelerate the behavior change you're aiming for.

Developing processes to implement culture is a great way to systematize behavior in an organization. These processes include recruitment, hiring, onboarding, performance evaluation and rewards.

Include culture as a hiring criterion. You can make culture part of your onboarding process. Also, culture should be an evaluation criterion in your performance reviews. Finally, make culture a category, or at least a subject of consideration for an award.

As you look at your processes in terms of hiring, onboarding, performance management, and rewards, ask yourself how you can change those processes to reinforce the culture you're trying to create.

Performance management

By creating a high-performance culture, you must manage the performance of the entire organization. This means setting goals and evaluating results. Culture is one element of high performance, and the other is the result. Let the team know how you will evaluate their work and report back. Both good and bad.

Balanced scorecards can be an effective way to link culture to results and ensure results don't detract from culture. This relationship is seen as an opportunity to improve overall performance. For example, improving customer service improves customer satisfaction, which we hope improves bottom line results.

Take time to look at your goals and how you measure them. Is there an appropriate balance between culture and results? If not, think about how you can change the goals and metrics to drive the culture and results you're looking for.

Rewards, both large and small, will reinforce employee behavior that is in line with the culture you are trying to create. They will also increase the efficiency you are trying to achieve. If you want your team to embrace your culture, you need to demonstrate how that culture relates to and contributes to performance. These links must be established both at the level of organizational performance and at the level of individuals.