How to deal with a Toxic Work Culture

 or 

How to Create And Sustain A Positive Workplace Culture

I was working with a new client last week they asked me about how to deal with a poor workplace culture. 

The MD said it had started with a several months ago when he heard a few slights and a couple of individual negative comments between team members Then he looked into it and he saw that this negativity had spread throughout the company, from a minor issue it had exploded into a "real storm in a tea cup." Suddenly everything had become an issue, some people not speaking to other people, or only under duress with backbiting, a general lack of trust and a lowering of morale throughout the whole business.  

He was amazed at how fast this toxic culture had spread and created such a hostile environment in which to work. His first question to me was how do you banish toxic workplaces and foster a positive culture in your business? 

Here are some key tips which leaders find as effective ways of resolving toxic cultures.  

Take ownership of the Problem.

Culture starts at the top. It is caused by leaders not leading. Owning the company culture is at the very heart of leadership skills.  That requires leaders to continually feel the pulse of their company culture and not forget that leaders lead people to get results. 

Negative environments need to be resolved by creative mechanisms to hear, take ownership and resolve employees grievances across departments. Identify the relevant real underlying concerns is a vital first stage for leaders to take ownership of the company culture. Leaders need to be seen to be taking charge of the culture and not expecting it to be someone else's responsibility. 

Find the root cause of the problem

Root problems are not usually the people, but situations which drive the wrong behaviours in those people. How those root problems manifest themselves in establishing a negative culture are the symptoms which you can see and feel. Identifying common root causes fostering and driving a toxic culture enables leaders identify and correct their leadership style while developing an appropriate action plan to change the cultural environment and build morale through positive actions.   

Positive action must start from the top. It starts by leaders taking ownership for the current culture. Changing the dialogue at the top, and throughout the organisation, is the first stage of culture change. Change has to start with the leadership, this is the essential part of leading change, but it takes everyone to step up, but do not do it until you have all the staff, particularly senior staff to be fully engaged. 

Staff engagement is the ultimate solution

Ensuring engagement throughout the organisation is the cornerstone to shifting cultures. Not just engaging with department heads and the 'vocally aggrieved.' Staff engagement requires everyone seeing the impact of a toxic culture and how it impacts upon their personal and the whole business performance.  Key to this stage is engagement with the solent majority, not letting the client or directly unaffected duck out of making change happen. 

Don't tell, always sell the solution to the problem. Ensuring that everyone is bought in to change is best achieved when it is the people inside the organisation who come up with solutions, which resolve issues. Moving workloads, skills development, shifting responsibility for outcomes down the line all support culture shifts as it is employees who are driving change, but those actions only happen if people are engaged and understand why those changes will benefit everyone. That ownership and engagement, even the collective recognition of the need for change ensures that you have whole team engagement with your desire to make change happen. 

Make a plan of action

Now you have everyone onside with removing the toxic culture it is now the time to devise a plan. Involve everyone in making a small first step (quick mentality) this promotes engagement, supports action and delivers change. It is in effect a team building exercise ensuring everyone is part of the solution. 

Don't do the hard stuff on day one, build up changes in behaviour you want to see. Start with the end in mind, but don't expect a one day team building exercise to change the culture of an organisation. It could be something as insignificant as instigating a clean desk policy (led by the leadership team) through to supporting a charity event throughout the company. Whatever it is it must be a step together in the right direction, that everyone sees and feels.

Owning behavioural standards 

Once you have the first step forward together, then it is the time to to lead the culture shift. This is where you carry the momentum forward with energy and enthusiasm to shift how the company behaves. How people treat each other is at the heart of a positive cultural shift. That starts and finishes with the leadership team.

Own the behaviour means that leaders have to walk the walk with everyone and show them how to behave both publicly and within private groups. Thinking about the impact a leader wants to make is at the heart of leading culture change. Do as I do is vital in building trust in a new culture.  

What does good culture look like and feel like needs to be clearly experienced. It is not an email or a piece of wall art, but a feeling people experience. Managers need to be managing to the positive culture and recognising in their people good cultures at work, what is called soft skills analysis and measuring that, not just the hard KPI's of department. People falling short must be brought to account immediately, privately and given guidance and support to achieve the behavioural standards that have been established.

Positive behaviour role models

Identifying champions of change is an exemplary way of driving change. Creating champions within and across departments to take ownership and drive individual initiatives ensures that change can be embedded at a local level. 

Enabling these people to support (not drive) culture change means they need to be recognised as role models in delivering good behaviour. This recognition by everyone to see the positive behaviour standard and measure themselves against it. Leaders need to provide recognition for role models who are leading the change in behaviours within the company. 

This shift is at the heart of driving positive cultures, from the top down, so that effective leadership behaviours cascade down to sub-ordinates and across departments. 

Establish strong company values

A company's core values need not only exist, be seen and lived from the top down.  The fundamental beliefs of any business need to be clearly defined and relatable to everyone's individual role and reflected in their behaviours. That correlation between those core values and people's personal positive behaviours have to connect. 

To make values stick they need to be transparent across an organisation. That requires people to see those values in other people so that they can feel that everyone is living those fundamental values. That shared appreciation of values ensure that they exist in every else's role. 

Company values are the guiding principles that govern how the business operates, an unseen language which everyone shares. Strong values matter, but they need to be more than a lip service or wall art. They need to be lived, re-enforced and therefore owned from the top down. 

Traditionally that meant when people were not following those behaviours they were held to account by their senior management, today that has been reversed so that people self diagnose what the right behaviour and their colleagues guide and re-enforce them.    

Bring those values to life

Living values, bringing them to life every day is something which leaders need to focus on. Leadership teams need to define clear touch points with employees on how can they demonstrate the values they want to see in others. Living company values matters today more than ever before.  

Connecting company values to everyone's role seems an extravagant exercise, but it is an essential investment. Positive cultures have to live within an organisation.  So creating tangible touch points for values brings them to life.

Keeping values alive requires total involvement of employees, in reviewing their living of those values in ensuring they are kept alive.

Measuring what Matters

Removing negative behaviours requires people to measure what matters in culture.  Leaders need to ensure that what they expect the organisation to do does not conflict with but actually compliments those values. 

Often measuring the wrong outcomes means driving the wrong behaviours. Classic errors include bonus payments and other incentives for individual performance which may be detrimental to the company culture. Growth drivers particularly those around sales are often the most damaging to company cultures. 

Measuring what matters requires leaders to focus on the long-term culture and strategy, not the short-term tactical drivers. If leaders focus on short-term tactical goals, it is often at the expense of culture, damaging the long-term success of the business.

Culture has to be measured, how do people feel, how much do people work for each other, is everyone pulling together. It is often the quiet and unsung people who set the tone of how a culture is being lived throughout the organisation. 

Leaders must measure the culture throughout the organisation and ensure that strategies and tactics fit within the cultural framework you have, and how leaders implement new strategies within the positive culture framework you want to have.      

Leadership: the importance of soft skill development

Creating and instilling behavioural standards of what leaders and managers need to demonstrate in every action and interaction is the essential soft skills development leaders need to invest in. Creating clear demonstrable standards of positive culture they need to sustain to ensure that best practice by everyone is driving and supporting that culture. 
  
Cultural behaviours should also be linked to your appraisal process, so that their role and personal objectives are tied to developing and and supporting others in driving a positive culture.

Like to know more about improving workplace culture then get in touch with Richard here or learn more at www.richardgourlay.com

Do LESS Be MORE As A Leader

Do LESS: Be MORE: A LEADER

The Art of Leadership: do less and BE MORE

The challenge for leaders today is that expectations about leaders are so high. They are in charge, and that means that they must know everything that is going on, be able to wave magical wands to fix anything at a drop of a hat and have answers to unforeseen issues. This expectation puts unbelievable pressures on leaders, pulling them into operational doing inside the business rather than leading their business. 

Leaders to stay focused on leading, must therefore member the golden rule that any business is a group of people delivering something. If you want them to succeed then the leader must create the successful conditions for that success to happen. Leaders therefore must design and build the environment for success, and then make it sustainable, so the environment becomes a stable one to continue that success. 

Leaders need to therefore focus on their people leadership skills, not task or output.  

Leadership Vision 

For leaders to lead they must first identify their core purpose in leading, or as Simon Sinek calls their WHY, why are they running this business? What is their vision for their business, which defines them as a leader, who are they, what do they stand for and ultimately what difference do they intend to make. That clear and shared vision drives the purpose and establishes the direction of travel for everyone. Without a clear vision and purpose leaders are often left dealing with internal politics between differing factions pulling the organisation in differing directions. 

Creating balance between work, home and self is an important aspect of leaders. Avoiding being overdriven, having time to think and reflect is vital for leaders to be able to research opportunities, evaluate options and balance their work within their life. Taking on too much, juggling too many competing elements will lead to poor leadership decisions, personal pressures and often leads towards burnout.  Balancing your life is a key skill in being a effective leader.   

Two Key Skills in Stepping Back

The first key skill of all leaders (except the one-man band business) is that you need to make yourself redundant from all operations. This statement often shocks leaders I work with, but if you are in the business you cannot be working on it, and you cannot be leading it effectively. Do less within the business enables you to do more for the business.

If the business can operate fully without you then you can lead it effectively. This means ensuring you are not critical to how it works, from sales to delivery, from operations to overtime you must not be essential. That means empowering your people to run everything, with the autonomy and responsibility to deliver what the customers needs. The more you empower the simpler the business becomes, and the more rewarding it is for its employees. 

Empowering people and letting them fly in their role, frees leaders to walk the floor and see how their people are performing, removing the blockages of the flow (the smoothness of operations) is an important first leadership stage in what is called the servant leadership role. 

The second is in looking at developing people, from praising people for doing a good job, and challenging them to develop their own solutions to their problems. Called safe failing, it is allowing people the freedom to try solutions and see what works rather than having to wait for something to fail before it is escalated up to the leadership. While praising people is a positive human touch skill, challenging people to solve their own problems within safe boundaries is a real leadership skill. It takes trust and a changed mindset to encourage people to try to create solutions rather than always asking what to do.  

Challenging people to come up with solutions to improve their role, changes the dynamics of employees perceptions of their leaders. How many solutions have you tried is a great way of suggesting that they have not yet find the right solution, and even better might be to  point someone in the right way by offering them a resource to go to, or providing a mentor to support their development into a solution. 

Leaders work through their people, so how a leader positively influences them is the success of their leadership of that person. Developing a variety of ways to influence people is a key skill of leaders in today's world. having a variety of ways and tools to influence people requires leaders to keep learning how to influence people to drive and support them to do try and do new things. 

Leaders must therefore build an effective management team around them who can deliver that vision. Developing an effective team is vital if a leader is to succeed. 

Leadership Focusing on the Future

Leadership is about being future-focused, hence the requirement to create and sustain your inspiring vision as a leader.  Leaders are always looking forwards, assessing tomorrow's market, where and how it is changing and then engineering the business to exceed within tomorrow's business environment. 

Leaders are visionary architects, focusing on the big picture and the long-term future. It is for others, the management to do the building. Leaders create the problem, here is where we are going and why, now get us there. It is for the managers and Senior Leadership Team  (SLT) to develop the execution.   As your business grows and you have employees it has different needs of you. The proportion of your time spent on doing is likely to need to decrease as the business grows.

Many business owners find it difficult to let go of the control and to pass on the operational doing to others enabling everyone to learn and grow. Letting go means that you are sustainable and thriving in your own role as the leader and are able to create the conditions for others to thrive as your business grows.

When you create the time to lead you are able to stand back from being involved in doing and identify what the business needs to continue to be successful in the future. Thinking about the challenges ahead and orientating the business to take advantage (or avoid) of them is the ultimately role of a leader. 

Stepping up as a leader first requires you to trust yourself and secondly to trust others to deliver instead of doing it all yourself. Doing less and being more is a mindset which leaders must develop. As you build trust in the capability of the person you are empowering and as they become more confident in the task they are being empowered to do, your involvement will become less. This frees you up to grow as a leader and add more value to the business.

Growth Mindset

Having a growth mind-set is key to sustainable leadership. If you and your people don’t continue to grow as the business grows there will come a stage where the business has out grown your capabilities. So making time to be coached and to coach your people so that they develop and grow creating the space for you to grow is vital. 

As a leader you need to take people on the journey with you in such a way that they feel they have played their part and that the outcome is one of mutual success. Carrying people forward is a key part of what makes a leader successful, they must be able to create, share and carry people forward with their vision of where they are going and WHY.  Overcoming stagnation is a major challenge for leaders in shaping the future and making changes to achieve that future.  

Growth is not a single action, a one-moment activity. Leadership requires leaders to continually scan their market for new opportunities then assess them as to their potential for their business in terms of fit and Return On Investment (ROI) compared to other options.  To keep looking is a mindset, not a single action. Working out what an opportunity might look like to a business and if and when it should be researched requires leaders to keep scanning and develop ways of assessing, good fit criteria, cost to undertake and likelihood of success within their market, which comes with experience and by developing systems of assessing good ideas.   

Assessing opportunities requires leaders to develop a robust assessment process that buys in the team to the opportunity from a number of different angles. The growth mindset requires carrying people forward into making change within a company. So if they can see what change those opportunities might mean.   Bringing people with you in assessing an opportunity and modelling up what change will look like, its impact and how different departments and customers might respond. 

Change is emotional. It is often seen as a threat so people go into fight, flight or freeze modes, and many employees will resist change. Your job as a leader is to connect with them at an emotional level and help them to identify their own reasons as to why the change is necessary. Move everyone forward,  not just the laggards, but the whole body forward together, so that they can all see the trajectory that they need to follow.  Your role as a leader is to steer the ship not run round being a busy fool.

So as your business grows are you doing less and being more, if so you maybe on your way to be a successful leader.

Looking for mentoring support by Richard Gourlay then get in touch with Richard today here.

Successful Leaders Measure Outcomes 

Many leaders struggle with leading people effectively. While I come across many different issues one which is prominent is that leaders do not set the right environment for people to work within. Too often leader's focus on outputs, not on outcomes. The challenge that leaders struggle with is in creating a results focus cultural attitude that measure outcomes instead of outputs.  

So what is the difference between an outcome and an output? Why does that matter and why is it difficult to differentiate between the two? And finally why is it crucial for leaders to focus on key results measures of outcomes and not just outputs?  

I recently had a client who called me in because his sales team were not following the sales process they needed to undertake. Each one of them has developed their own way of doing through the procedure, reinventing it or tweaking it (their words) to make it work for them. They were all busy doing things and their management and leadership teams could see the stress on the workload, the impact on the processes and on the customers, and on the results. Working with  them I could see that they were focused on being busy creating new steps and explaining why things could not be done when the customer wanted. The team had become busy being busy, but not focused on the customer, and the management response was to look at how busy they were through CRM micromanagement, which demotivate the team and the support functions rather than focus on what they were achieving.    

This is the challenge for leaders. They deploy a plan and step back and mange outputs through CRM KPI's, not on outcomes for the business, the employees or the customer. Here's this issue visualised in a chart by Burns and Bass, outputs v outcomes.  

Outputs vs Outcomes

An output is something that people do, while an outcome is something that happens as a consequence of that doing activity.  “I have made 50 calls to prospective customers” is an output, “I’ve closed a new customer” is an outcome. Which one is more important? 

Measuring the activity, the output, tells you how busy someone is, while measuring the outcome, the result tells you have effective they have been at the task in hand. Outputs, being busy always start out as the simplest measure to activity, but they are a false measure of success. Outputs are activity measures, while important in their own right, they are not what leaders should be measuring, these are measures which management should measure activity through. 

A strategic thinking leader might ask to their line manager, “Why have you made 50 calls and not generated  new customer from those calls? What are you saying to people?”

Being busy is simple; being effective is what matters for a successful leader. Strategic leaders focus measuring outcomes towards the end goal. Effective leaders start with the end in mind, measure what matters, is what differentiates successful leaders in leading their organisation from others.    

Most people naturally focus on outputs, being busy. It’s relatively easy to come up with a list for what you need to do today, this week and this month. However, as Stephen Covey explains in his book The 7 habits of highly effective people, outputs always come last. In order to be successful, you need to start with the end in mind, by focusing on the outcomes you want, and then work backwards to outputs that lead to the outcome(s) you are focusing on.

For example if you want a new customer, that is a outcome. How you achieve that is to identify what are the steps to getting a new customer. 

1.     Defining a target audience.

2.     Prospecting that audience with a call to identify likely suspects

3.     Gain a meeting with suspects, present a solution / offer.

4.     Close the sale and confirm the customer is on-board.  

5. Pass onto the customer retention team and start again.

The objective, one new customer is a clear outcome. The outputs to get there, steps 1 to 4 above are all activity-based outputs, which the team focuses on delivering towards that outcome. The outputs are measurable activities, which are supported by operational initiatives, such as who is going to do what to deliver them. 

Leadership Strategic Approach

1. Where do I want to go? Is an OBJECTIVE: the outcome.
2. What are the results that lead us to achieve in order to get there? KEY RESULTS outputs towards the outcome, steps 1 to 4 above.
3. What do other people need to do to achieve those results? Theseare the operational INITIATIVES, task activities.

If leaders start with activities (i.e. the Initiatives) they take themselves out of control of where they are going. Leaders must focus on the objective, the outcome to be accomplished. Anyone can be operationally busy, but it leaves the operation unfocused on the end objective. Initiatives such as writing the script, recording the stages in the CRM system and who to call back are all operational activities, which are important to achieving the objective, but are overseen by the management not the leadership.  

Successful leaders define the outcome and resource the outputs to their management team and then focus on leading the team to achieving the outcome.

Activity-based or results-driven?

Leaders must obsessively focus on the objective, from its inception through to its completion. By focusing on the outcome leaders, lead their people relentlessly towards the objective. Define the outcome you want to achieve before you define the outputs that will get you there. 

For many leaders, focusing on outcome achievement instead of outputs requires a significant shift in culture and thinking. Defining outputs is easy, focusing on doing things. Doing something makes people feel good, but doing the wrong thing can still feel good until someone steps back and sees that they have not moved towards the objective, they have just been busy. 

Doing things to achieve a specific outcome is a lot more complicated, and now success is not measured anymore by, being busy or by the percentage completion of your output, but by progress towards the end goal.

This shift can be a challenge for many leaders, but the results demonstrate the consequences of your actions and learn what you can do to achieve certain results. The faster you learn, the better you get, as an individual, a team, and a company.

Leaders must measure performance towards objectives within your business? Are you activity-focused or results-driven? Are you happy when 50 prospects or 100 prospects have been called this week or is what really matters to you how many customers you closed? The latter measure of outcome achievement is more informative to the business KPI than the former. As long as Key Results are on track, leaders should not get involved at the Initiative-level. If the business is off-track, then it is sensible to review the initiatives with the relevant management and operational staff to ensure they have a clear output plan that supports the objective outcome. This is where leaders can help the team to figure out what or why it’s not working, and brainstorming what other initiatives we could try to get things back on track. 

KPI’s: measure outcomes

KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators, just in case you don’t know) are the reporting  indicators which drive decision making. For KPI’s to drive business results then they must indicate outcome performance, not work rate outputs. 

One big advantage for leaders of measuring outcomes rather than outputs is that it enables them to step back and allow management to manage more effectively. Giving space for managers to manage, removes the accidental tendency to micromanage operations. The risk for leaders in any organisation is that they struggle to define where they should get involved and where they should not.  By stepping back leaders can retain their overview rather than being drawn into operational activity.

Summary

To improve your organization, then leaders need to focus the whole team on outcomes instead of outputs. Focusing on outcomes puts the end in mind first, tracks the progress of what really matters, and enables the leadership to learn about company capabilities.

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Focusing on outcomes will not only boost performance, but it is also a natural protection against micro-management. Don’t tell sales reps how many outbound calls they need to make today (output), instead make them responsible for closing a certain amount of customers each month (outcome).

Like to learn more about leadership? Then buy the book Strategy: the Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Company Culture: the 8c's of Cultural Competitveness in Business

Company Culture: The 8c's in Defining Business Culture 

Company culture has been the key driver of differentiation between companies.  A positive company culture defines the gaps between average performers and high performer companies within any sector of business.  Company culture demonstrates its true personality, is the environment in which employees exist.  Culture is what differentiates brands within every business sector.  

It is culture which employees buy-in, from first engagement through to life-time employment. Culture matters from cradle to grave in loyalty in employing people and in creating loyalty with customers.  Company culture is the only real differentiation between leading brands in maturing market sectors.   Company culture is not a single element but includes the entire working environment, established, maintained and driven by its leadership.

Yet despite the importance of culture within the workplace few leaders focus on identifying, creating, developing and sustaining the right culture within which great teams can succeed.      

Business Culture Differentiates You

Culture within the workplace is today the biggest differentiator between organizations. The whole working environment, creating and developing a successful company culture is today at the heart of leadership goals for companies who want to stand out within their sector. Behind the concept of cultural differentiation is the assumption that the culture is inexorably linked to behaviours within a brand that define the results the customer (and employee) will experience.       

What makes a company culture a success within a market is easier to see once it is in place, but hard to identify as standalone elements. Cultures within companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple are commonly referred to outstanding examples successful business cultures as popularised by Dan Pink in his outstanding book Drive.

Company Culture

Company culture is at its core a cohesive set of beliefs embodied within a set of living values.  These living values often phrased as the way we do things around here, have to be lived by everyone within the organisation.  That life comes from and is sustained at the top of the organisation, its leadership.   What they do matters, but only if they believe it matters. The leadership team must all do it together and consistently and measure themselves and be measured by others for it to live and thrive.  From remembering first names, to saying good morning, to what you wear and how you behave, culture matters most at the top.  

The key elements of culture are often a challenge for leaders to identify, develop and measure the effectiveness in delivering. I’ve put together a simple set of key elements, 8 in total which I think you can measure a company culture by. So here is how I think leaders can measure their company culture, and how to develop the culture they want to achieve.    

How to assess your Company Culture.

Company Cultural Competitiveness by Richard Gourlay

Looking at each element in turn here is what I think leaders need to think about in developing their company cultural competitiveness.  

Company Cultural Competitiveness  

The overall effect of culture on the performance of an organisation is the end result of measuring the cultural elements which make up a successful organisation. The overall impression of the culture within the organisation, what people see, feel and experience through to being able to measure the impact all the elements of culture, the cultural impact upon the overall competitiveness of the organisation within any market is the net result of a cultural position within a market. 

If you are of a certain age you'll remember the outstanding Seattle Fish company Fish video on what a cultural competitiveness looks like on a teamwork culture within a business. The impact of culture upon an organisation can be both dramatic and highly effective ways to compete within any field of business and that overall measure is made up of the 8 combined elements that make up the cultural competitiveness below.  

  

1. Competitive Position

Companies find and develop their place within a market sector, where they successfully compete. It takes careful strategic positioning of the brand to develop a coherent competitive position within a market. Successful brands make that position identifiable and defendable, and so they can sustain it for the long term.  

That ability to consistently defend a desirable position within a market is core part of a successful company’s culture. A competitive position within a market creates a style in how they own that space within that market is a vital element in making any brand a sustainable success.  How a business competes is a cultural approach from the top of an organisation. 

From product development, marketing and sales through to its relationship structure with its customers the approach it takes is defined and determined by the culture its leadership delivers. As a business matures it can develop a competitive position, through consistency within a market, which company’s can sustain as part of its cultural approach to how they defend their market position. 

2. Core Competency 

Where and why does your company excel at what it does without having to stretch itself? Businesses like people develop areas of expertise in which become good at through consistency and develop into a cultural competence in undertaking. These core competencies become areas, which organizations culturally outcompete others within the sector. Things that the organisation has learnt to do well.

Like an Olympic athlete, you see them perform at the top level, only because they have worked hard (with real raw talent as a start point) to get themselves there. The basics of what they do, the discipline to get up at 4am every day for years so that they can run heats and make the finals and still be able to excel is all because they have the core competency to get that far. The same is true in companies; great companies have their culture built upon core competencies, which they can rely upon to put them where they need to be to perform when they need to at the highest level. 

Core competencies, areas where organizations operate more efficiency and effectively than their competitors are central to their success. They provide an internal strength, a natural or developed competitive advantage within their market and an ability to excel in certain operations or activities. 

3. Company Capability

What can a company do, what is its capability to do something new, innovative or different? A company’s capability reflects not just how stretched an organization is in delivering its standard operations but more importantly upon its capability to do more than just survive. A company’s cultural capability is the ability for a company to invest in developing itself and its people for long-term success.  

Companies feel their capability in how they look at challenges and opportunities. Companies with a confident cultural approach, a positive attitude to situations, allows employees to take risks and learn form them. Employees feel comfortable suggesting ideas, trying things and in expressing their views in a hierarchy free environment.  Capability is about confidence which is developed through consistently delivering.  The impression that they can deliver, reach and achieve goals sustains that capability culture.

If a company feels capable it reduces and then removes traditional command and control mechanisms, replacing them with a freedom to operate culture. That culture develops its talent faster than its competitors and develops talent identification, acquisition, development and retention as a clear cultural strategy. 

4. Collaboration Culture

A culture of collaboration, working with channel partners, both upstream (supply chain) and downstream (strategic customers) is a cultural approach within a market. How companies collaborate, where, when and with whom, provides a competitive culture. It allows both small and larger companies to leverage their size within a market. Organisations with lower barriers, without the silo mentality approach can do more, quicker and more effectively.  

Using supply chains to develop innovative products, up-streaming product sourcing, or working with specialist outsourced manufacturing; working with people in ‘open collaboration systems’ creates a cultural competitive advantage. 

A competitive culture using collaboration multiplies the competitiveness of a company within its market.  Those companies that collaborate successfully outcompete their market competitors through both upstream early adopter acceleration and down stream channel control. A company which embraces a collaboration culture punches above its weight and allows everyone to contribute to its success. With lower barriers, and lower formality and hierarchy, the collaborative culture enables talent to shine by breaking down self-limiting control mechanisms    

5. Cultural Cohesion

Organizations which operate in silos, have cost effective units but sacrifice cohesion between the departments. The strength of silos is in internal department strength, but that cost effectives creates counteracting two factors.   

Firstly in how silo’s operate, differing departments develop at different paces, stretching organisations between strong and weak departments.  Where those differences are wide then an organisation can progress only as fast as its weakest element. As different departments develop and evolve the cohesion and cooperative way they work alters. If the gap grows between departments in how they operate then this negatively or positively impacts upon the cohesiveness of the whole organisation.  

Secondly interdepartmental work suffers; the ‘them and us’ culture creates poor morale and lower trust between departments. The lack of collaboration between department’s lowers productivity, implementation and innovation, it results in low internal cohesion. Companies where cohesion is high, allow people to move across departments, encourage joint project working and develop people’s talents and encourage synergies that produce a cohesive organisation.  Cohesion is a vital element of a cultural competitiveness. 

6. Corporate Culture

How the leadership pulls together is another important element in competitive culture development. How the leadership pulls together, around the clear strategy for the business in place requires full stakeholder engagement. This creates a coherent culture throughout the corporate body, enabling everyone to pull together around the living culture. 

Ensuring all shareholders and stakeholders are fully onboard, meeting agreed shared precise short and long term objectives, is an important element in competitive companies. When all parties are pulling together organisations can drive forward without having to carry alternative opinions and dissenting voices and activities. The less time the executive team must spend on ‘managing’ or directly fighting with other stakeholders' objectives the more time they can spend their time focusing on delivering their corporate strategy.      

7. Collectiveness 

The second challenge for leaders to assess within the corporate organisation is that of corporate collectiveness.  identifies is that with stakeholder engagement the leadership can leverage from its stakeholders. Stakeholders, rather than just being the shareholders and influencers can also directly contribute to its success. Bringing in new skills, contacts and support. 

The third element of corporate collectiveness is in sharing responsibility for the actions of the company.  Taking collective responsibility for customer satisfaction is the most common experience which leadership teams can measure within the culture of a company, how you can measure your cultural collectiveness.  

8. Communication

Probably the most apparent identificator of culture is how an organization conducts its communication.  Good communication inside, throughout and beyond is a sign of a positive culture within an organization.  The change from ‘knowledge is power’, the closed, controlling top-down, need-to-know to one of open multichannel dialogues is the most significant cultural shift within companies today. 

Poor cultures such these are typified by the as email everything all the time, and the endless meetings to endure, both reflect the ‘tell them what I need them to know’.   Poor communication cultures often include heavy formal reporting of every activity, numerous KPI’s and other activity measurements, creating a police like state within the organization. Companies with this type of culture rely upon formal multiplatform reporting from CRM, weekly reports, pipeline reports, and monthly plan updates.  

Those communication styles create controls and formality, reducing trust and creating distance between leadership and their teams. Micromanagement exists at every level and employees feel like they are in a sausage machine of productivity, often where the reporting takes longer than the activity.  Apart from the obvious demoralization of the workforce, it also reduces creativity and reflects in people’s attitudes at work that they must undertake their role in only one way. 

Today’s positive cultures include multilevel communication, open mentoring, positive feedback loops at all levels resulting in engagement throughout the organization.  Objectives at all levels are understood and discussed.  Emails are there to summaries actions and outcomes. The use of open team software tools allow, real-time monitoring and proactive support with project oversight reporting. Informal meetings and continual mentoring, including Agile working  practices all support improved communication. 

In companies with positive and engaging cultures, people feel empowered within their role and enjoy high-engaged awareness of wider issues within the whole business. Good communication breads holistic communication which encourages and motivates people to opening engage with the their organization rather than try to manage communication. 

Like to talk about how to change culture, then get in touch: contact me here @cowden

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