Is Your Organizational Culture a Mess? Here’s How to Fix It.
You probably see the signs already. Attrition is rising, your teams are fighting with each other, work outputs don't match your expectations, and you're not delivering results. It's really frustrating as a leader to pour energy into moving things forward only to experience setbacks in the end.
Trust me, every leader has been there. While some leaders are born, most are made through a series of experiences (and often mistakes). Setting the right culture for a high-performing team is difficult and requires special attention to both soft skills and processes. Read on if you have had enough and want to fix your organizational culture, once and for all.
Leaders that are intentional about their culture are more successful.
Culture can either happen or as a leader, you can direct it. Would you let your manufacturing or marketing teams wander into results or would you want your leaders to develop a plan to get there? Culture is the same; you need to understand where it is, where you want it to be, and develop a plan to get there - which means it needs to be an intentional focus every month. However, cultural change doesn't happen overnight because large groups of people and their behaviors are slow to change. In the end, it's worth it because culture is the most powerful tool an organization can use to achieve its goals. It affects strategy, communication, execution, and talent retention. That's your entire business! You can't deliver unless these are operating smoothly.
Start by establishing leadership principles for your organization.
Do you have leadership principles or values defined for your team? If not, then your team has to guess what's important, which is not a recipe for success. The first step to establishing your culture is to define it. Your organization’s leadership principles should be based on the company's mission, vision, values, and strategic priorities.
Leadership principles tell your team what's important and how to make decisions based on those values. In my time at Amazon, we often had extended discussions about strategic issues like pricing, operational support, and cost structure. Each of these presented trade-offs between the business and the customer experience. When we reached an impasse on an especially difficult decision, we would always go back to one of our most important leadership principles: Customer Obsession. If prioritization was difficult, we would make the decision that would prioritize customer experience first and manage cost structure or operational hurdles on the back end. Amazon publishes their leadership principles on their website if you need a good set of examples to get you started.
Your principles should help the leadership team, and their teams, make decisions faster and with more confidence, at scale. Don't underestimate their capacity for positive change in your organization.
Build leadership principles into hiring and performance management.
It's not enough to just write the principles down. You have to incorporate them into your hiring and performance management process to ensure lasting change. People often ask me why Amazon had so much success over the years. Yes, it has an amazingly talented team. Yes, it hit on multiple highly-valued consumer needs. But really, it succeeded by scaling talent while maintaining its core values. It did this by creating a values-based closed loop process between hiring and performance management. That's how you go from 10,000 to 700,000+ employees in less than a decade and still achieve the results you want…