Creating a Performance Culture

If your leaders are concerned with getting results, they must consider the state of your organization’s culture, and recognize the enormous impact of behavior patterns on the company and its people.

Taking an organization’s culture from an underperforming entity to one that can be defined as having a “performance culture” is a situation senior leaders often face. It’s an active process, one that is both led and managed. Its aim is to help the company achieve a competitive advantage by enabling it to better execute its strategy. An organization without a performance-oriented mindset faces more challenges than one aligned to create conditions that focus employees on performance.

A Culture of Underperformance Hinders Results

The lack of a performance culture makes it difficult for your business to deliver on its current commitments, and hampers directional change when a different business model is necessary to implement change. When performance increases are called for, but your culture is diametrically opposed to them, employee satisfaction tends to be low. In addition, if your organization is under-performing, you will find it challenging to retain your top performers.

Performance Cultures Challenge Top People

Senior leaders who create high performance workplaces know that their top people require the personal challenges that are found in a high performance culture. Accordingly, they are charged with the responsibility to ensure that their organization is strategically positioned to achieve stated objectives.

To that end, you must also recognize that your company’s culture must function in a manner that is receptive to growth. Your culture determines how quickly decisions are made, how easily problems get solved, how resilient people are when faced with adversity and how quickly customer needs are met. That’s why it is crucial to have a strategy that reinforces a performance-based culture.

How CLG Helps Create a Performance Culture

CLG will help your company create a performance culture by ensuring that critical path behaviors that lead to desirable business results are consistently reinforced. This will fuel business momentum and create optimal conditions that encourage each level of your workforce to put forth discretionary effort.

CLG helps Make It Clear in terms of what business outcomes will be positively impacted by a performance culture. We identify those critical path behaviors that are the earmarks of a performance culture.

We help your senior teams Make It Real to every tier of your leadership hierarchy by educating them in the discipline of Applied Behavioral Science (ABS). With ABS, your senior leaders can design work environments that encourage employees to go above and beyond their required job description. When employees work in an environment that inspires performance, they are also inspired to excel.

When your leaders understand how to analyze and define the results of their analysis in terms of critical path behaviors, they can Make It Happen. This understanding empowers your senior leaders to activate the necessary critical path behaviors, and reinforce their people at all levels when they do things differently. During the Make It Happen stage, performance changes are organized and aligned by the senior team’s strategy. This adds up to a measurable impact on your company’s ability to achieve its business goals and a shift in the performance orientation of its corporate culture.

Make It Last. A performance culture is sustained when all of your management practices and human resource systems are aligned to support the critical path behaviors. This is also the time to proactively mitigate misaligned systems to sustain a high degree of business momentum and motivation.

View our related case study for an in-depth view of one client's experience: Company-Wide Culture Change Helps Chemicals Company Eliminate Barriers to Improving Quality and Reducing Costs.