Culture: A Competitive Advantage
There are many tangible and intangible elements deployed in a business, perhaps the most important of these elements is “Culture”. Due to its intangible nature, culture is not easily understood or defined but you can be sure that your workplace has a culture that may or may not be working for you.
Culture is directly related to performance and will determine the extent to which success or failure is achieved above almost all other business elements. Culture is the yin to the yang of traditional business levers, neither of which may perform to their optimum without the other. Elements of culture include vision, purpose, values, and leadership, all of which connect to emotional intelligence rather than IQ. For example, describing a sense of belonging or finding meaning for words such as community, honesty, and integrity can be incredibly difficult to articulate but easy to “feel” if you connect these words to a “lived” experience. Values underpin culture, they go to the heart of our belief system and engender passion, emotion, and engagement. Similarly, a “Vision,”, (the What), and “Purpose”, (the “Why”), can be powerful motivators for creating a sense of belonging, community, and engagement for employees and other stakeholders.
Culture in a business sense is hard to put your finger on but think of it as the “How”. Sometimes felt as a feeling or gut instinct, we often refer to it culture as “fit” or “the way we do things around here”. Regardless, every organization has a culture either deliberate or accidental, and either positive or negative. As leaders come to realise the influence and value culture has in their business, they are looking for tools to help measure, understand, and develop culture/employee engagement. These measures can include employee engagement surveys, leadership development surveys, and personality profiling. Used properly, these tools can be powerful insights into an organisations current culture, resources, and leadership by benchmarking performance and providing pathways for development.
Values are the emotive behavior descriptors that underpin culture. A values-based culture is shaped by a clear set of ground rules establishing a foundation and the guiding principles for accountability, behavior, and performance. A high-performance culture focuses on moving forward collectively, pushing boundaries, learning, and not apportioning blame. Forward-looking with a growth mindset. It is not about winning or losing, it is about the process. There are always learnings and things to work on with the most valuable learnings coming from our biggest failures.
Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
To embrace failure as a learning opportunity is to demonstrate a growth mindset.
Some Key Elements of a High-Performance Culture
Employee empowerment/Freedom in a Framework.
Transparent and empathetic leadership at all levels
A customer-centric organisation.
Active communication and collaboration with a focus on listening.
Training and development /performance feedback
A continuous learning organisation.
Leaders lead by example, “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept”
In summary, business success is dependent on many variables, both tangible and intangible, but culture is perhaps the most underrated performance enhancement tool offering a sustainable competitive advantage for all businesses and sports people alike.
By Steve Alesech | Business Advisor
