Cultures that work enable and accelerate change.

I'm in the business of cultures that work.

You know a culture is good when it works - that is, a culture enables positive, productive work.

You know a culture is working when:

• People feel they belong and can bring their best.
• The collective effort is stronger than the sum of the parts. A good culture is where people feel safe and hopeful for the future.
• People are clear on, and feel connected to, the organisation’s purpose, where individuals and teams can learn, fail, grow, and develop mastery.
• People have genuine choice and work autonomously toward shared goals. 

For a culture to 'work', it needs to work for the organisation, customers, team members, and the community. People want to stick around when cultures are working because the culture is working for them. These cultures are worth belonging to.

The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) researched culture and high-performance organisations in 2018-2019. They found that, in terms of revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction, organisations with healthy cultures were 3 times more collaborative, 2.5 times more innovative, and 2.5 times more likely to view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow.

You know a culture is working against you when you spend your time and energy on the wrong things - when you spend more time doing business with yourselves than with your customers.

Political environments where you have to spend more time smoothing the way than doing the work are broken cultures, where power and status are misaligned with accountability, or you have to manage up to be successful.

Broken cultures use workarounds on the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Cultures that don’t work won’t work even when systems are good. Cultures that work:

• Don’t require free food and rock-climbing walls. 
• Work even when systems don’t. Good cultures find great workarounds for the right things. 
• Enable better decision-making.
• Are adaptable, resilient, and have the capacity for readiness for what is around the corner.
• Make work worth doing.

Is your culture working?

Let's work together to get your culture working.

[or, maybe you need to shift to somewhere the culture will work for you? Check out Careershift.]

Try This Experiment

Shift how people see awards. Increase the value of your awards. Not the spend value but the esteem in which they are held. How valued are the awards you give out now? Consider how you can make them matter more. Make the awards ceremony more of an event, or shift from a formal to an informal approach to make the awards more accessible. Of course, the first question to answer is, 'What behaviour are we actually rewarding?'. If you are rewarding the wrong things, shift this focus first.

Questions for reflection:

1. How do you reward and award success?
2. What are the success rituals in your team?
3. What rituals could you introduce to shift how your teams view failure?