Aligning your most crucial organisational and leadership practices can bring your organisation to the tipping point of a high performance culture, writes Wayne Brockbank
With all the buzz about the importance of culture as a key element of business success, relatively less attention is given to the mechanisms through which culture can be created and sustained. Before weighing into the details, two important but frequently overlooked assumptions in defining culture should be noted. First, to impact business performance over the long run, the culture must be framed to meet the requirements of the marketplace.
Second, the culture must be translated into specific competitive behaviours and not left in the form of overly general competency models. The driving behavioural question should be: “What are the behaviours that our people need to exhibit so that they result in powerful sources of competitive advantage?” Thus, accurately and specifically defining culture in the first place from the outside-in is centrally important.
As the following organisational and leadership practices are followed, the organisation will embody and sustain the culture for business success. Two sets of questions should be asked. Assume that fast innovation is your desired culture. The first set of questions is:
- Recruitment: To what extent do we hire people on the basis of their prior track record of creating fast innovation?
- Promotions: To what extent do we promote people on the basis of their contribution to fast innovation?
- Transfers: To what extent do we transfer people around so that they can be exposed to excellent role models and practices of fast innovation?
- Outplacement: To what extent do we move people out of their jobs or out of the company on the basis of their not exhibiting fast innovation?
- Measurement: To what extent do we measure fast innovation at the organisation, team and individual levels?
- Rewards: To what extent do people receive financial and non-financial rewards for fast innovation?
- Training: To what extent do we use classroom training to train people in fast innovation?
- Development: To what extent do we use on-the-job development to develop fast innovation?
- External reality check: To what extent do we use the voice of external customers and shareholders to communicate to our people the importance of fast innovation?
- Systemic communications: To what extent do the formal communication processes (e.g. newsletters, speeches by senior executives, in-house video systems) communicate the importance of fast innovation?
- Information system design: To what extent is the information system designed to provide people the information they need in order to be fast at innovation?
- Organisation structure: To what extent does the structure of the organisation encourage fast innovation?
- Process/work design: To what extent are work processes designed to encourage fast innovation?
- Physical setting: To what extent does the design of the physical setting encourage fast innovation?
- Leadership: To what extent are leaders regular and consistent role models of fast innovation?
Once you have diagnosed each of these practices with the above questions, you may then ask, “Which of the practices that are most out of alignment would have greatest impact if you brought them into alignment?”
The combination of these two sets of questions will help you to know which of your organisational and leadership practices are most out of alignment and will have the greatest impact if you bring them into alignment. By redesigning and implementing these practices to be consistent with the desired culture, you will move your organisation to the cultural tipping point of high performance.
Essential considerations for successful culture management
- First, the tipping point logic of Malcolm Gladwell suggests that to have impact on culture change you cannot do one or two things well; rather, you must do a lot of little things well. Gladwell’s logic is empirically supported by the earlier research of Mark Huselid, who found that companies must successfully implement about two-thirds of the organisational and leadership practices mentioned here, with discipline and focus, in order to transition into high performance.
- Second, it is imperative that HR professionals design and implement practices that are focused on implementing the desired culture, instead of simply designing and implementing HR processes that they know how to design and implement. For example, one of the world’s here-to-fore leading banks had done a very good job in rigorously defining the culture it needed to succeed. The HR department then designed and implemented the above practices with focus on the desired culture, with one exception. One of the company’s most visible HR initiatives was its annual engagement survey that was an off-the-shelf consultant survey that had very little to do with the desired culture. This visible HR practice created enough “concept clutter” to undermine much of the other culture work that had been done to the detriment of the bank’s overall performance.
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