Defining Culture Anew
In thirty years of work in many different performance contexts, business, sport, charities and the arts for us the evidence is clear. If you want to create the conditions for sustained high performance paying attention to the culture that grows around your team and organisation is fundamental to producing the results you want.
It is also true though that culture can easily become a very intangible critical factor that is hard to address and change. We, at Culture EQ, have a process that provides a route through this intangible landscape and allows you as a leader or key player to practically effect the culture change that produces higher performance.
Culture is the interactions between people within an organisation. A unit of culture can be said to be one single interaction between two people. This means your total culture is the aggregation of every interaction between every individual within that organisation. For example, in a team of 30 people your culture will be made-up of 30×30 = 900 interactions which can positively or negatively change your culture. A lot of opportunity for change!
What the best Cultures focus on
Higher performing cultures make sure each interaction effects three things. Building clarity of what I need to do to improve performance in a role in a team, increasing my interest in what I’m doing and increasing my learning about how I do what I need to do. Constantly building these three elements (clarity, interest and learning) produces more flow experiences in your business. Being in flow is where people enjoy their work and produce their best performances even under pressure.
If clarity, learning and engagement declines then performance and results will drop which is why culture is so fundamental to sustained high performance. Enhance the quality of the interactions and clarity, learning and engagement rise and so therefore will performance and results. The outcome of your culture is the performance and results delivered by the people within that culture. Change your culture, IE change the quality of those interactions, and you can change your performance and results.
Where to effect change
If there are 900 possible interactions happening on a daily basis it’s a lot to try and get a handle on and feel like we can affect to improve performance and results. We focus on three areas where the interactions become critical to the overall ambient feeling of performance within a culture. These three areas are ‘having conversations’ in a room (e.g. meetings), how we help people get things done (perform) and finally the extent to which we do things to make people feel cared for.
We work to distil this into a maximum of ten behaviours – typically five key ones for ‘in the room’ where critical issues are discussed and decided – four more to focus on how to help people to perform and one that focuses on how we’ll care for the people in our organisation.
The Output
The goal is to identify clear behaviours that people can recognise, repeat and benefit from. Repeating them allows further improvement in low and higher-pressure situations in our working context.
