High Performance Culture and Alignment

According to an excellent whitepaper by Aon Hewitt, (Getting Real About Creating a High Performance Culture, 2016),” ….46% of organisations identified defining or aligning culture as a key priority.”

Culture is a key competitive advantage. Change is occurring too rapidly to forecast accurately. The workforce is facing challenges in their personal lives that may lead to increased fear and uncertainty about the future. The separation between personal and work life has always been a myth. Now that we have non-stop news and information overload assaulting us from every device we have, it is impossible to imagine the workplace as a quarantine. It is a tough time to define, build and sustain a high performance culture.

In some experiences I have had recently, organisations have had leadership adopt a ‘batten down the hatches’ philosophy. The indicators visible to an external consultant working with such an organisation include poor strategic communication, confusion about accepted behavioural norms and fear. The fear is not always easily identified. I always find it in companies that lack meeting rhythm between managers and employees. I see it where there is little ‘ground level’ innovation going on to improve effectiveness and productivity. There are other ways fear is identified.

How does a leader deal with culture in this geo-political economic era? I suggest it is a return to some very basics of interpersonal relationship skills. It would be great if it was not a ‘return’ as opposed to a refocusing. Most people involved in an interpersonal relationship and particularly an intimate one, would identify communication as the primary contributor to the health of the relationship.

It is no different in an organisational culture. However, many leaders of organisations have behavioural styles that deliver communication in short direct bursts as opposed to a story or interactive dialogue. Communication is often delegated and diluted. People see through this and it only leads to greater fear, uncertainty and disengagement.

I believe vision is critical. Vision is critical to individuals, couples, families, organisations, communities and all the way up to nation states. Without a vision it is impossible to build a compelling strategy and even more impossible to engage people to execute the work needed to achieve strategic objectives. 

Without a vision, your mission will be detached and unaligned to anything meaningful to your people. Lack of meaning equals lack of engagement. Lack of engagement kills a high performance culture.

These are only two big picture contributors to a sustainable high-performance culture. Communication and vision. There are others. I offer below two of the most impactful high- level initiatives that will contribute to changing a toxic or poor performance culture to a high performance culture.

·        Learning and development is part of the culture and not dependent upon people asking permission or waiting for approval. Senior leadership support learning and allocate resources to learning opportunities openly. Learning is linked to performance management processes. Learning is used to support innovation and collaborative, social knowledge sharing.

·        Senior leadership is visible and accessible. There are some huge companies I have worked with that have leaders who leverage technology to remain accessible. When senior leadership communicates, they do so openly and transparently. Senior leadership repeats vital messages to ensure there is retention. The senior leadership never cease to show the alignment of strategy to the work that people are doing throughout the organisation.

Remote Leadership Presents Unique Challenges

Leading remote employees is now a fact of life. Over 80% of teams and 90% of projects have at least one member not physically located with the rest of the group. In addition, a recent study from GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com showed that the number of employees who telecommute more than one day per week increased over 79% from 2005 to 2014.

While the principles of effective leadership and team management haven’t changed, maintaining peak performance and keeping employees engaged when separated by miles, time zones and culture is a tall task for any manager or organization.

Let’s be honest—leadership of others is already hard enough when they are down the hall or on the shop floor. When you add in the challenges of them being remote, it gets harder—and more stressful.

  • How do we communicate successfully?
  • How can we make meetings (that are already painful in person), work using technology?
  • How do we build the relationships and trust with the team—and help them do that between each other?
  • How do we present ideas, change and more at a distance?
  • How do we coach and give feedback successfully?
  • How do we deal with the unknowns? After all, we can’t see what they are doing, how they are doing it and if they are ever working?

If have ever struggled with even one of these questions, you know what we mean. Leadership is hard…doing it remotely is even harder. We have partnered with the Remote Leadership team to create bite sized e-learning courses that build the skills needed to successfully lead and manage a virtual team. With 18 courses, covering six topic areas, remote leaders now have the tools they need to be successful leaders, no matter where their employees work in the world.

To get a copy of our latest e-learning catalogue email us.

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