Just how easy is it to build a strong business culture that promotes high performance? In the continuing Masterclass series, Philip Atkinson highlights precisely how to build and sustain such a culture.”
Organisations with poor or weak cultures very rarely achieve their full potential. Right at the top of a senior management “wish list” must be a desire to rapidly replace a culture that is negative or ailing, with one that is thriving and dynamic and delivers superior performance. To build such a culture needs clear definition of the ‘cultural drivers’ within the business that, when applied, yield significant business improvement. The ‘drivers’ often lie well beyond the grasp of the senior team because ‘corporate culture’ is wrongly perceived by many to be ethereal, intangible, vague and elusive. Senior managers have failed to de-mystify corporate culture – thus never shaping the business in a concrete and measured manner.
In 95% of organisations, their culture exists by default than by design. However, those organisations that do decide to become architects of their own destiny can create and set in motion the engine to sustain a strong customer focused business, hitting all the major deliverables. What needs to be understood is that:
Cultures can be defined and measured in precise terms.
It is possible to define precisely the culture that will yield the desired results.
There are ‘cause- effect’ relationships in the business that can identify what, within the culture, will cause specific results – whether profitability, cost reduction, customer acquisition and retention and ROI.
Cultural change can be a very rapid and simple process to manage, deliver, measure and control.
Culture change and improvement can be sustained with some simple tools.
There are several keys to driving a cultural change initiative, but the most important are:
Vision – knowing where the organisation is going in terms of performance.
Agreeing Values i.e. “how” we can make the transition between the organisation as it is now, and what it will become.
Triangulating current performance – what in “cultural terms” is inhibiting performance improvement, and taking action to remove those inhibitors.
Using Leadership as a vehicle to drive change. Identifying specific behaviours that will shape the new business and rewarding them.
Creating a very simple plan to drive the installation of change and measuring improvement. If we cannot measure corporate culture, we cannot manage it!
Make every opportunity to communicate the plan, celebrate successes and build the measures into specific performance agreements.
Reward behaviours that take you further towards your goal for the new business culture.
Lead by example, train, coach, mentor
Finally, if the culture change is to be sustained, the business must equip line managers as change champions having the skills and attitudes to master change beyond their technical competency or function.
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