3.1 Leading People – Business Excellence: What it Means, What it Looks Like, How it is Achieved

3.1 Ten Essentials for Creating a Flourishing and Self-Perpetuating Culture

In most of the visioning and future-looking sessions I've attended, the usual comparison is to what it was like more than 100 years ago, but as I explored in last week's blog, there has been a dramatic change in what people do at work, even in the more recent past, i.e. the last 10 to 25 years. I can only presume that trend will continue unabated for the foreseeable future. An often overlooked aspect of all this change however, is that us humans haven’t changed that much -- DNA changes slowly and ours is much the same as it would have been many thousands of years ago.

While you might argue that we have adapted well to the new and continually-evolving environmental and technological advancements, there are signs, and empirical evidence to back it up, that our bodies and brains aren't keeping pace. This is what I want to tap into in the next ten blogs on creating flourishing and self-perpetuating cultures. The fact is that our DNA has evolved from a time when the environment was literally life threatening, where the differential emotions from threat to relaxation was huge, and survival depended on belonging to a tribe. Much of that is not true in a modern environment. By understanding how our more basic human drives are being adapted, or not so well adapted, to our modern environment, we can start the journey of bringing the best out in our people and achieving a "win win" for our businesses.

Why am I focusing so much on “culture”? To repeat an often used quote from Peter Drucker, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast ...", and culture is usually that strategic “elephant in the room” … everyone knows that to achieve the company's strategic aspirations, the culture has to change, but no one knows exactly how to go about it, let alone get anyone to volunteer to tackle it head on. Many companies however are going down the transformation pathway, which is at least acknowledging that things have to change, but most of what I'm seeing in industry at the moment, is little more than a department being formed as an extension to the Project Management Office, and the leadership of change being abrogated to middle management. If however transformation programmes are going to success, they must meet at least two fundamental criteria:

1. They are leader led, and it stays that way;
2. The end-state is clearly defined and articulated, including a definition around culture.

While these blogs on Leading People could address a lot of the fundamentals of Human Resources, there is already a lot of information out there to adequately cover those areas and more. I’m not saying that doing the fundamentals is not important, I just want to put some ideas up that are emerging from the study of positive psychology and the associated neuroscience research, that will help address that “elephant in the room”, culture, head on. So, my Top 10 underlying drivers for setting up the culture for success are summarised below. They are not intended to be comprehensive, but areas that are either poorly understood or not addressed at all.

1.     Write down your definition of culture and continually measure progress to its achievement;

2.     Peak performance comes from your people finding meaning in what they are doing;

3.     Languishing organisations don't confront poor and value-destroying behaviour;

4.     Flourishing organisations are mostly positive organisations;

5.     There's a known structure for the creation and measurement of high-performing teams;

6.     Give people the tools to do their job better -- and it's not just more technology;

7.     Measure people’s “stress” levels and then segment accordingly;

8. Design the organisation for overall well being, and performance will come;

9.     Do performance appraisals often and positively;

10.  Layers of process and face-to-face "huddles" are essential for optimally managing resource and focus.

In the coming weeks, I will expand on these points and look to share the "gems" that might help you make that inevitable next change programme less of a transformation project, and more of a routine way of running the business ... that ends up driving the change.

If you like what you read here, please share with your network, and also, if you see areas for improving the quality and relevance of the content, please feel free to share your comments and questions.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to next week, where I start to explore in more detail my Top 10 Essentials for creating a flourishing culture ... starting with why culture is so important.

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