You can’t separate culture from performance
Let’s Start With a Story
Your company is implementing a global ERP solution. The project has been going on for years. Each week you attend a Steering Committee meeting where the CEO hears project status – your typical stoplight chart – so he can track how things are going. Someone, a workstream lead, presents a status YELLOW and highlights some tasks that need to be completed, or decisions made, to get back to GREEN. If the tasks are not completed or the decisions are not made in a timely fashion, the YELLOW could become RED. The CEO questioned, very argumentatively, that workstream lead for a solid 20 minutes – clearly signaling that he did not like the color YELLOW.
So, the workstream lead said, “If it makes you more comfortable, I can change it to GREEN’.
For that workstream lead, and the others in the audience, it was clear that to make it through a Steering Committee meeting with the CEO, just present GREEN status and if you have tasks to complete and decisions that need to be made – get them done on the side, in quiet – no need to take them to the CEO.
Over time, what might happen here? I imagine the CEO never hears the truth. And when go-live arrives and there are issues (in this case there were many) he will act surprised. As well he should if the leads had been falsely reporting GREEN status leading up to go-live.
The experience the CEO created in that Steering Committee meeting led workstream leads to form the belief that you can only tell the CEO what he wants to hear which led them to act in a way that was dishonest and misrepresented the truth.
We will come back to this story but let’s jump to something I see all the time – well-intentioned but wrong approaches to culture change that don’t benefit the business.
Culture Produces Results
Please don’t chase a cool, popular, likeable culture that makes employees happy.
Align your culture to the performance results you deserve.
Full stop.
Here are a few things NOT to do, to address culture issues.
1. Don’t review popular top 10 lists like
a. The top 10 features of a healthy culture
b. The top 10 red culture flags
c. The top 10 signs you have a toxic culture
d. The top 10 things you can do to turn your culture around
e. The top 10 culture traits employees want
f. The top 10 culture mistakes leaders make
g. Don’t assume the culture issues are someone else’s problem; everyone contributes to company culture
2. Don’t compare your culture with a popular company whose culture is always held up as the standard to achieve
3. Don’t assign an aggressive go-live date by which you want to have the new culture in place
What You Should do to Create the Culture that will Drive the Performance Results you Deserve
Start here: Is the following statement true for you?
Our current culture is not getting us the results we deserve AND we are committed to deconstructing it and reconstructing the new culture to achieve the results we deserve.
If yes, you are ready to execute this formula (see Change the Culture, Change the Game by Roger Connors and Tom Smith)
The variables are defined as:
If culture is the consequences of employee experiences and beliefs and actions, then we need to create the experiences that form the beliefs and drive the actions to get the results we deserve.
Take a moment to reflect on the story above. As we go through the steps to execute the formula, we will change the story, so the CEO experiences a great go-live!
Follow These 4 Steps to Execute the Formula
Note: when we do engagements like this, we spend time setting the stage and preparing the organization before jumping into the formula. (See our post on Trust called The one thing that changes everything to learn about a critical predecessor to culture change.) But this is a blog post, and we need to keep it somewhat short.
Step 1: Define the Results (R2) You Deserve
What are the 3-5 performance results you deserve? These may be the same metrics you measure today or new ones or a mix of current and new. How do your R2s compare with your R1s? Where you have a 1-to-1 relationship, put them in a table side by side for a strong visual. If you have new R2s, establish a baseline metric, R1, if possible.
Back to our story: Our R2 is that we deserve on-time implementations that give us our expected returns on investment.
Step 2: Assess Your Current Culture (C1)
What are our experiences that are based on our beliefs and forged by our actions? Think of conduct in meetings. How you onboard new hires. How you feel working with certain teams or certain levels. Does your company promote from within? Use surveys or focus groups to uncover what is truly going on in the organization. If you work on a shop floor, how often do you see the manager checking in with the employes? How is company information disseminated? From whom do you hear about significant changes or industry insights? Is there high trust in leadership? Are leaders and employees held accountable for their actions?
QUICK TIP: Accelerate this step by reading Gustavo Razzetti’s post titled Do You Really Know Your Culture? Here’s How to Find Out: 100 Questions to Help You Uncover the Workplace Culture You Actually Have
He has organized the questions into categories so don’t be intimidated by the #100! If you do nothing else because of this Insight post, review Gustavo’s list – I promise you will learn more than you are prepared to learn, and you will thank me (and Gustavo, of course).
Back to our story: Our CEO stifles the truth and punishes those who bring real issues to light.
Step 3: Define the Future State Culture (C2) You Need to Achieve the Results You Deserve (R2)
What are some elements of C1 we want to keep? What are some new experiences we can create through actions that form beliefs to realize R2? Just like you did for your R1’s, you can create a table that lists the elements of the Culture in 2 columns, Current and Future, to be able to see how you can go ‘from this to that’ in a nice visual. It will also help you gauge the size of the delta from C1 to C2.
Pause for a minute and look at your C2 list and your R2s. Can you see those culture elements contributing to the performance results you deserve?
Back to our story: In our new C2, we expect our employees in charge of executing our projects and priorities to always report the truth, even if the news is bad – leaders will listen to them and work through the issues with them in a timely manner.
Step 4: Execute the Shift from C1 to C2
OK – so clearly this is a big step. And how big depends on the delta between your C1 and C2. Suffice it to say, culture change is an all-hands-on-deck project. Engage everyone at all levels in a variety of ways. Treat this change like the priority project that it is. Hold each other accountable for the new experiences employees are to enjoy and create an environment that allows for respectful dialog when old behaviors surface. Culture change doesn’t happen overnight so proceed with grace and patience and a healthy dose of humility.
Here is one way one client incorporated the formula in small, incremental steps: A distribution center receiving supervisor was introduced to the Culture Is Performance formula, wrote it out on the whiteboard in his office, and showed it to his peers. And he talked about it with them. And, together, they each came up with meaningful ‘experience’ examples they could impact if they were purposeful about it. And they committed to holding each other accountable for it.
And slowly, experience by experience, they implemented a culture change on the receiving floor. And attitudes started to change – for the better.
Now everyone who enters the supervisor’s office learns the formula and engages in meaningful dialog about how they too can contribute to a new culture through creating the experiences that form the beliefs that drive the actions that will get them the results they deserve. They are developing new positive habits together and seeing the results in the data – which in turn motivates them to keep doing it! How powerful is that?
The experiences you create for all those with whom you come into contact are your choice. Choose wisely because they are developing into the beliefs and actions that = results.
Back to our story (epilogue): The new, safe environment in which our company executes projects and priorities means we rarely need to slip a go-live date because issues are surfaced and resolved quickly and professionally. We realize the return on our investments. Employees who used to shy away from working on special projects now enthusiastically volunteer!
