Culture-washing away your productivity

Culture is hard to define, measure and change. All great reasons to spend very little time on it, despite everyone nodding vigorously about its importance.

What's the issue?

1. The simplest and most practical way to define culture is also the most negative: it is the lowest level of behaviour the CEO is perceived to tolerate.
2. The most positive way to define it is that it’s the sum of your values, attitudes, beliefs, behaviours and assumptions (or V. ABBA if that helps). But let's face it, all these words are somewhat ethereal, and when the business is under pressure (and when isn't it?) how exactly do you crowbar them into an exec agenda that’s focused on more pressing tangible matters such as business development, cashflow and (being) the next acquisition target?
3. In my experience, even if you believe culture is right up there with strategy, the chances are that you and your peers spend a shedload more time talking about strategy than culture.
   
   I’ve heard senior leaders defend this imbalance by saying that culture is fixed and, as all disciples of Agile know, strategy is anything but. Not so. Culture is a living moving thing, even if it is the tortoise compared to the hare of the strategy. To change (or just live up to) your culture is much harder than changing your strategy, because strategy is only about changing what you do, whereas culture is about changing how you behave.
4. But I’ve found that the biggest issue is that most organisations’ actual culture doesn’t match the lovely words in the glossy employee handbook. And that’s worse than not defining it in the first place. It says to the employees that those accountable for culture either don’t care about it, or can’t do it. Either way, it’s a sure-fire way to get your followers to stop following you.

Consider this

1. Your culture is the ONLY thing that sustainably differentiates you from your competition – for goods, services, talent and investment. Your patented products will become generic, but your culture will bring customers, employees and investors flocking, year in, year out.
2. If your cultural actions don’t match your words, there is no surer way to sow distrust. And without trust, you have nothing (as you may remember from a couple of previous emails where I’ve banged on about that).
3. That strategy that you spend so long developing is only ever going to be as good as people’s willingness to make it a reality. Sure, you can command-and-control people’s compliance, but not for long. They’ll leave, and your colleagues may even be pleased that they do, not understanding that the poor performance they see in those leavers started with them.
4. Your culture saves you huge amounts of bureaucracy on policies and guidelines. The whole point of your culture is that it is a set of expectations about how you work together, how you make decisions, how you understand what matters etc.
   
   When it’s done well, culture is quite brilliant in that it simultaneously gives both guiderails and freedom, in ways your policy manual can only dream of.
5. Think about your culture not as some soft-skills politically-correct tick-box PR exercise, but as your most powerful driver of productivity. It’s hard to get right, but when you do it delivers hard results.
6. Culture and strategy aren’t alternatives, or competitors. It’s not ‘either or’. Your culture is the most strategic thing you’re accountable for.

Try this

Spend a bit less time on your strategy, and a bit more time on the one thing that will motivate the entire organisation to deliver it.

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me via the button below, and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.