The company culture depends heavily on the leader’s personality, character and vision…
The culture of the company affects every level of the company and determines:
- How you act and operate.
- How decisions are made.
- How you treat your customers, employees.
- How your employees treat each other.
- How you handle failures and celebrate successes.
- The acceptable code of conduct.
- Why certain things are required.
A highly performing company culture increases engagement, retains good employees, satisfies their customers and has better results than any other company.
That is why leaders have to hold themselves to very high standards and realize how much their behavior impacts their workplace.
Wondering how to create a high performance culture?
1. Assess the current state of your company
Leaders have to purposefully create and maintain a healthy workplace culture.
However, they must first be a living model for the culture that they want.
Leaders must take a good look at themselves when assessing the state of the culture: if the culture is unhealthy, then the leadership is unhealthy.
2. Define your why
Leaders must clearly define their purpose, personal mission statement and the vision for your company.
Building a high performance culture is subjective to the leader.
It is important for leaders to have an initial idea of who they are, what they want and where they are going before they start hiring.
3. Define your core values
Core values are fundamentals beliefs, a set of principles that leaders follow and that guide then through life.
For example, a company can be based on the core value of radical honesty. In such culture, employees don’t sugarcoat anything, are able to tell the truth no matter the circumstances.
4. Define your version of success
It is important for leaders to define the short term and long term goals, to give their employees a definition of success so they know what to aim for in the long run.
For example, success can be meeting deadlines and hitting results.
Success can also be defined on different levels of technical competencies or on leadership abilities.
Leaders must be realistic about their goals and set clear expectations for employees. Setting unreachable goals will only demoralize your team.
5. Apply the Golden Rule
The Golden Rule is the principle of treating people the same way you want to be treated.
Because leaders are role models, they have to become culturally sensitive and inclusive.
6. Empower your employees
There are several ways that leaders can empower their teams within the company. They can:
- Play to employees strengths and place them in the right roles. Help employees gain awareness and achieve their highest potential.
- Acknowledge hard and good quality work.
- Allow employees make mistakes.
- Trust in employees decisions making skills. Employees will then feel confident about their abilities and stay engaged.
- Encourage training. Employees perform better when they are confident about their abilities.
7. Give your employees a sense of ownership
Employees take more pride and respect more what they do when they have ownership over their work.
Giving a sense of ownership will help you develop great leaders who will in turn inspire and motivate.
8. Promote innovation and change
Innovation is necessary for the survival of each and every company in today’s economy.
When leaders promote innovation and change, people will be more likely to grow, to adapt, ask questions, to try new things and adopt a change mindset.
9. Value transparency
Leaders must encourage a transparent and open culture where information flows freely.
For instance, letting your employees know how well your company is doing will improve trust.
Of course, there will be gossip around the health of the company but overall employees will believe that you have their best interest at heart.
10. Practice collaboration
Leaders promote and encourage autonomy and collaboration within their team.
They allow their teams to have fun at work.
They have broken down traditional workplace structure, simplified workplace processes and looked after their employees well-being.
11. Appraise customer satisfaction
High performance cultures are hard to come by.
Leaders continuously conduct customer satisfaction assessments because these assessments give a direct indication of team performance and the health of the company.
12. Monitor your culture
There will always be things to improve in a company but it important to strive for more.
It is up to leaders to:
- Nurture, develop and sustain the culture.
- Deliver a set of tools to drive performance.
- Show that the health of the company matters.
- Give regular updates on how employees are doing in regards to their individual and collective goals.
Last Words Of Advice!
Most leaders, when trying to improve their cultures, focus on metrics and not on the people.
If your culture is not where you want it to be, remember that:
- One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.
- You need to focus on the positives.
- You just need to take on step at a time. For example, start by sharing your goals or by being transparent about the current status of the company.
- If you don’t think you can practice of implement the culture that you want, find a manager or a human resources person who has the skills that you are missing.
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
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