What is a ‘Winning Culture’? 

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Everything I’ve witnessed and learned has taught me that in The Corporation, culture is everything. How does it go? ‘Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast!’ Ugh. A company can survive, thrive even, in the short term with a fabulous product that hits the market zeitgeist, but without attending to its culture its decline will be terminal. But cultural change is often simply another act of exercising power and making people conform to ‘new’ behaviours. So how do we facilitate genuine cultural change and development of an organisation?

It starts with clear and inspiring INTENTIONS

What intentions do we have for our business and how do we express and communicate these to our stakeholders? 

What is the organisation’s Purpose or Mission? What was the original founding idea or world problem that it set out to be the solution to? This may have changed along the way of course, but when we go back to that initial and original spark that created the business, we have a chance of honouring our heritage and the often enormous well of goodwill, emotion and value of our history. Often this is expressed in the brand values curated by our PR or advertising agency, who may have been finer guardians of the Purpose than successive management teams. 

What is our Vision for the future? What is the finest and clearest emotional picture we can create of what our desired future looks like and feels like as we look towards the horizon?

What are our Values? What are the written and unwritten rules and guidelines we will lay down and enforce for the way we want to behave in our journey in service of our Purpose and in striving to make our Vision a reality? 

 What are the ‘Iconic’ Goals we will set? What are the big, symbolic, indisputable milestones we will set to guide and inspire us and for us to be sure we’re on track, and that we’ve arrived? And what are our ambitions for each group of our stakeholders – investors, senior executives, middle managers, employees, customers, suppliers, the community in which we operate? If one group is overly favoured, worse still if one group is demonstrably dis-favoured, then once again we can achieve some apparently ‘great’ things in the short term, but long term we are doomed. So we need an ‘Iconic’ goal for each group. 

I use the term ‘intentions’ as the heading for these aspects for one simple reason. We are absolutely guaranteed NOT to achieve any plan we set out. Things will not go according to plan - we simply cannot control the universe to the degree required. External events WILL occur to blow us off course. So if we are rigidly wedded to making the world look precisely as we have said it will be, we are going to be inevitably disappointed. We simply set ourselves up (to fail) as machines in control of nature, Corporate Canutes who will waste massive amounts of energy and resources, enslaving everyone involved to the fatuous pursuit of the impossible. 

But if we have ‘intentions’ we allow ourselves to be human, and thus we are free from the emotional weight of ludicrous expectation, and free to adjust the tiller and re-set the course if events dictate. We want the clarity, inspiration and guidance of Vision and Goals, but we must retain flexibility to be realistic and relevant. 

It is anchored on clear and disciplined STRUCTURES

Once we’ve set the course, we need to organise ourselves for the best possible chance of success. We need an efficient and enabling organisation structure, a sound and well accepted operating model, efficient (maybe even ‘lean’) business processes, HR processes that genuinely enable people to perform to their very best, and we need clear boundaries and disciplines for recognising, rewarding and sanctioning behaviours and actions.

And while we will establish our Values in step 1 along with our Purpose, Mission  and, Goals , actually we then need to bring our Values into working for us as non-negotiable structures. Whilst our Goals might change as the world unfolds before us, our Values are the one likely constant. They are ‘the way we do things around here’ and as such must be enforced as processes more than desirables. 

And the same goes for Coaching. Coaching is not a behaviour, it is a structure. It is a non-negotiable process we will use for the achievement of our goals. As a skill of course we understand that people will not be perfect Coaches – Clumsy Coaching is the way, but just as people need to be educated in the business processes and conform 100% to them for maximum organisational efficiency and collaboration, so with managers Coaching.  

It lives and breathes through desired BEHAVIOURS

The finest plans are often found in documents gathering dust on shelves or in filing cabinets, whilst chaos and failure inhabit the organisation. A great plan is essential, and the first two stages above will give us a phenomenal plan, but it is in the execution that we live or die. This is where the ‘rubber hits the road’. It is how we actually behave; what we actually do that brings a plan to life. And this is the biggest aspect of potential disconnect in an organisation – that the actions and behaviours of all involved do not fit with what’s in the Plan. 

So the important aspects of this start with the way the senior executives role model, running then through how the middle managers and team leaders coach their employees, culminating in the empowerment of employees to willingly and voluntarily do the best / right thing in pursuit of the plan. I cannot over-stress the importance of what leaders pay attention to in guiding employee behaviour. I might even be tempted to say that this is the single greatest factor in guiding how employees behave and what actions they take and do not take. And again we come back to the power of the hierarchy, and why leaders have to massively over-index on their role modelling. Having put the work in to create the Plan, they obviously need to keep a check on progress, but this takes just a few moments each week. The vast majority of a senior executives’ time should be spent ensuring the behaviours are those desired. They need to focus on how people are prioritising and making decisions, on the quality of communications and relationships, on how people are feeling. 

The bottom line is that the behaviours are merely the outcomes of the cocktail of ingredients that have gone to make up the environment. Leaders need to work proactively on the Intentions and the Structures, and then monitor the Behaviours adjusting their inputs through leadership and coaching as they go. And since the Intentions piece should only take a very short space of time to establish the vast bulk of leadership and management time can be focused on the structures piece ie constantly refining the processes and constantly coaching. 

What is Culture?… More Importantly What is a ‘Winning Culture’? 

Culture is often defined as ‘the way we do things around here.’ Culture can often be the written vision and values, but more usually it is the unwritten rules that truly govern; the unconscious communication between people of how things are done and what is never to be done. So the really important question is what is a ‘Winning Culture’?

A Winning Culture is one where people are working to a set of desired values and behaviours in pursuit of an inspiring purpose, vision and goals; where this collective way of working leads directly to the achievement of exceptional results and where the community is so inspired by the shared experience that people come to believe in ever more extraordinary possibilities and are moved to strive for ever higher ideals.