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Here’s the dilemma: In a competitive, complex, and volatile business environment, companies need more from their employees than ever. But the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear, and compromising their capacity.

 

It’s no wonder that so many C-Suite leaders are focused on how to build higher performance cultures.  The irony, we’ve found, is that building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth.

 

A culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behavior. Learning organizations – Peter Senge’s term — classically focus on intellectually oriented issues such as knowledge and expertise.  That’s plainly critical, but a true growth culture also focuses on deeper issues connected to how people feel, and how they behave as a result. In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out; and spend less energy defending their personal value so they have more energy available to create external value. How people feel – and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.

 

Building a growth culture, we’ve found, requires a blend of individual and organizational components:

 

An environment that feels safe, fueled first by top by leaders willing to role model vulnerability and take personal responsibility for their shortcomings and missteps.A focus on continuous learning through inquiry, curiosity and transparency, in place of judgment, certainty and self-protection.Time-limited, manageable experiments with new behaviors in order to test our unconscious assumption that changing the status quo is dangerous and likely to have negative consequences.Continuous feedback – up, down and across the organization – grounded in a shared commitment to helping each other grow and get better.
Via The Learning Factor

Whenever any new technology emerges that challenges the way people and businesses have been doing things for years or even decades, the initial excitement is often overshadowed by uncertainty and reluctance to try something new. In the early days of the cloud, it was almost inconceivable to think that it would lead to such a profound shift in how businesses operate. More recently, the drive toward digital transformation has caused even greater anxiety in some organizations.

 

In this age of digital transformation, all industries -- from manufacturing and banking to hospitality and retail -- are evolving. This means that decision makers must identify key business issues, not technology issues, that digital transformation can tackle. Companies need to not only harness the power of the latest digital technologies and platforms to stay relevant and competitive but also course-correct their business models based on evolving customer demands.

 

This type of transformation should be seen as a journey, not a destination. It is a cycle of change and progress, both from a technological and organizational standpoint. It’s about constantly reassessing opportunities to do things better, faster and with greater scale in the evolving environment in which one’s business operates.

 

Via The Learning Factor

Companies want to be profitable and maximize their performance and impact both in the world and within their industry.

 

With that said, accomplishing those feats starts with cultivating a culture to allow those things to happen which starts with a priority on employee well-being.

 

Culture is important -- it affects engagement, mindset, reputation, recruitment of talent, and well being. When looking to cultivate a healthy and high performing culture, start by emphasizing these six points:

Via The Learning Factor

Via Strategic Leadership Group

In last week’s blog “Do you know how to overcome the key barriers to change?” I outlined two key barriers that will challenge your ability to stay the course when transforming your organization to the next level, and how to overcome them.  The first one was: “Not tolerating a temporary dip in performance and/or results” …

Anyone who’s celebrated a significant work anniversary knows just how a company can change over the years—who has a seat at the table, what customers expect, the most coveted skills. But there’s just as much that stays the same: what your brand stands for, the shared lexicon, your unique culture.

 

We use the term organizational DNA as a metaphor for the underlying organizational and cultural design factors that define an organization’s personality and determine whether it is strong or weak in executing strategy.

Via The Learning Factor

Every year for the past ten years, Glassdoor announces the top places to work all across North America and parts of Europe. The most unique part of this award? You can only win the award if your employees say so.

 

Glassdoor's methodology for the award includes a collection of anonymous company reviews where employees share their honest opinion on pros and cons of working for the company, overall satisfaction, the CEO, and workplace attributes. They're also asked if they would recommend their employer to a friend. It's a juicy turn of the tables.

 

Within the top 100 best places to work for, the industries that came out on top were tech, retail, healthcare, consulting, finance, and travel and tourism. The top cities included the Bay Area, Boston, and Los Angeles (just to name a few). So, what does it take to be the top of the top?

Via The Learning Factor

According to a seven-year study on workers’ performance, an inability to make this break between professional and personal time ranked among the top-10 stressful situations that people were least effective at handling. Technology has, of course, exacerbated the problem, offering both convenience and imposition, by putting our workplaces just a touch screen away. How can we all do a better job of leaving work at work, so our home lives become more pleasurable and less stressful?

Before leaving the office…

 

Do one more small task. Make a short phone call, sign a document, or respond to an email. This way you end your day on a positive note of completion. There’s gratification in knowing that you elected to push yourself and now have one less thing to do the following morning. And, as research from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle, has shown even “small wins” can enhance your mood.

 

Write a to-do list. On paper or digitally, make a record of all the tasks you need to accomplish, ideally in order of importance. When my organization worked with the New York Presbyterian Hospital Cornell Medical Center to survey more than 1,000 workers living in the northeast we found that the practice of building such lists was among the top three most effective skills for enhancing work performance and positively redirecting stress.

Via The Learning Factor

Focusing on a “critical few” behaviors is one of the fundamental tenets of working effectively with organizational culture. Sometimes called keystone behaviors, these are patterns of acting that are tangible, repeatable, observable, and measurable, and will contribute to achieving an organization’s strategic and operational objectives. The behaviors are critical because they will have a significant impact on business performance when exhibited by large numbers of people; they are few because people can really only remember and change three to five key behaviors at one time.

In the work done by Katzenbach Center consultants around the world, we have seen how a focus on a critical few behaviors helps bring about changes that contribute to meaningful business outcomes, whether it is a medical devices manufacturer tallying 10 straight quarters of revenue growth or a technology firm saving US$100 million a year in warranty costs.

Via David Hain

A company’s culture can be found it its values, behaviors, and visible artifacts like employee dress, interior design, and signage. What impact can you make?