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Culture Best Practices Health Check
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Is your culture Healthy? High
Performing? Strategically Aligned?
Corporate culture accounts for 40% of the
difference between high and low performing organizations in terms of revenue
growth, profitability, leadership effectiveness, customer loyalty, and
employee engagement.
This complimentary Corporate Culture Analysis
regarding organizational health, high performance, and strategic alignment is
based upon more than 25 years of research with high performance organizations
and a recent organizational alignment survey of 410 companies across 8
industries.
If you would like to know if your
organizational culture is healthy, high performing, and aligned with the
strategy of your company, department, or group, then this assessment is for
you.
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How to Design a High Performance Culture
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What Corporate
Culture Is
Do you know how to design a high performance culture? Culture is your organization's unique approach to how it executes strategy. If strategy is "what" you want to accomplish and "why", then culture is "how" you execute it on a day-to-day basis.
For example, let's say your organization
wants to grow market share by 10% to meet growth targets. To accomplish this,
what approach to the market should your organization take? Should it be more
of a market adopter, focused on improving existing offerings (like KIA)? Or
should it be more of a market leader, creating brand new offerings (like
Tesla)?
The answer informs "how" the
employees of the organization collectively drive strategy execution in terms
of market approach. Because strategy must go through people and culture to
get implemented, choices like this represent your organization's culture.
What Corporate
Culture Is NOT
The Point
The point is that none of these (a fun environment, your corporate values, or employee engagement) truly set your organization apart from others. Everyone wants to have a fun environment, be values-driven, and have highly-engaged colleagues. Today, organizational health is just a ticket to play the game.
Your workplace culture is your
organization's unique approach to "how" work gets done - it's what
makes your organization different from all others.
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Voice of the
Customer
"Thanks a
million for the great strategy and cultural alignment session for our global
leadership team. Your experience and patience to expertly deal with the
inherent and complex challenges between business units uncovered many hidden
truths that created a great road map for us to use as guidelines moving
forward as a unified leadership team. I recommend LSA to any leadership team
looking to shape and align organizational culture."
Juan Plaza | Sales
Leader, Latin America | Trimble Navigation
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Effective sales leaders grow revenue and
profits through organizational alignment by ensuring the go-to-market sales
strategy is clear, by building a high performance sales culture and by
attracting, developing, engaging and retaining top sales talent.
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What Is a Sales
Playbook?
Like a playbook in sports that plans for the most frequent and most important in-game situations, a sales playbook is a unique collection of sales scenarios, strategies, plans, tactics, and tools to help a sales team consistently win when the stakes are high.
And because every sales team has a unique
sales strategy, culture, solution, and definition of winning, the best sales
playbooks are unique to each organization and target buyer persona.
Three Prerequisites
to Creating a Better Sales Playbook
While in sales you may need to create a basic or interim playbook to keep the sales wheels spinning, a head coach would never create a game plan without knowing the sport that they were playing and their opponent; unfortunately, too many sales enablement functions create sales playbooks without getting the context right first.
Before you can define your key sales plays
based upon key buyer personas, goals, problems, and needs, three foundational
sales areas must be addressed.
Sales Strategy
First, your sales strategy must be clear, believable, and implementable enough to set the true north for your sales plays. Our organizational alignment research found that sales strategy accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing sales teams.
Do not make the mistake of investing heavily
in sales enablement tools until you have alignment around and commitment to
your target clients, value proposition, success metrics, and go-to-market sales strategies.
Sales Culture
Next, your sales culture must be healthy, high performing, and aligned enough with your sales strategy for it to accelerate - not hinder - your sales force. Sales culture, the way sales work gets done across the entire organization, accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing sales teams. Your sales strategy must go through your sales culture.
Do not underestimate the need for the right
sales culture to meet your targets. Otherwise your desire for a better
sales playbook to drive better sales results will falter.
Sales Talent
Lastly, you must assess the key sales skills required to execute your sales strategy and know how your current sales force stacks up against those sales skills and behaviors. Then, based upon your gap analysis, you can create a practical plan to fill the key sales skill gaps that matter most for your sales plays to be successful.
Make sure that any corresponding solution selling training is highly customized to your unique needs and reinforced by
frequent sales coaching. It is not very practical to create sales plays if your
sales force does not have the knowledge, skills, and business savvy to run
the plays well.
Elements of a Great
Sales Playbook
Once your sales strategy and sales culture are aligned and your plan to close key sales skill gaps is clear, you have the context required to design the right business sales training and build a better sales playbook with the right sales scenarios, sales plays, and sales support tools. |
Effective managers create alignment by
ensuring strategic clarity, building high performance cultures, and
differentiating top talent.
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 Difficult Performance Conversations Are No Fun Most managers (including me) dread difficult performance conversations with their direct reports and are willing to try almost anything to avoid them. Whether it is delivering bad news, discussing sensitive subjects, or firing an employee, the most upsetting performance conversations are the ones that evoke anger, yelling, accusations, defensiveness or tears.
As appealing as it may be to avoid a
potential confrontation with a coworker, we have found that high performing
team leaders face these conversations without dread. They are adept at
managing conflict in a way that creates clarity, trust, and accountability.
What do they do differently? .
There Are Countless
Tools and Techniques Available
There are countless performance communication tools and techniques available to help make performance management discussions better. They range from better listening, to being more empathetic, to being more direct. Used correctly, they can all help make difficult conversations about performance more productive.
The Six Most Common
Difficult Performance Conversation Mistakes
When we ask employees to list the most frustrating and ineffective aspects of ineffective performance conversations at work, six rise to the surface:
The True Root Cause
- Bad Performance Expectations
Avoiding these common mistakes will certainly help. But we find that they often do not address the root cause of most difficult performance conversations - a lack of clear performance expectations. |
Raising Performance
Expectations Can Dramatically Increase Performance
Done right, leaders know that raising performance expectations can dramatically increase performance. When people know that more is possible, they can lift their performance to higher, and often previously impossible, levels.
Hot Dogs and
Performance Expectations
Joey Chestnut has been the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest winner for twelve out of the last thirteen years. There's no doubt he's the performance king in this arena. The question is what can we learn from this food eating competition master about raising performance expectations at work?
Here's how Joey drastically changed
expectations about what was possible and the effect that it had on other
contestants.
For decades, the performance target of 20
and then 50 hot dogs appeared impossible to beat. It was as if there was an
invisible performance barrier which could not be surpassed. What
happened?
The Performance
Barrier Phenomenon
When performance barriers are overcome, people are often able to perform at heretofore unimaginable levels. They simply need to see someone else doing it to realize what was possible.
It is amazing what can be accomplished once
one person crashes through the performance bar. Think about when Roger
Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier in 1954. Runners had been
trying to break the record since 1886. But just 46 days after
Bannister's "impossible" performance, John Landy set a new record
with a time of 3 minutes 58 seconds.
Then, only twelve months later, three
runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.
Since then, over one thousand runners have
broken the 4-minute mile barrier - something that had once been considered
impossible by the best athletes in the world.
We see this performance barrier phenomenon
everywhere - in speed records, in computer chip sizes, in acrobatics, and the
list goes on.
Something is only impossible until it is
shown to be possible.
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Effective leaders create organizational
alignment by developing compelling strategies, building high performance
cultures, and differentiating top talent.
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