My interest in exploring the drivers of business success dates back to the late 1990s. While with STERIS Corporation, as Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Europe & The Middle East, I began to notice something during our annual strategic planning sessions. As the fiscal year progressed, our team would often be tracking to plan, at a percentage greater than the percentage of strategies we had implemented to date. What do I mean? We might only have 40% of our strategies implemented for the year, but we found ourselves tracking 70% or 80% to plan.
Something was contributing momentum to our endeavors…but what? Having a cohesive, well understood strategy was key, as was our ability to clearly communicate it. As leaders, we were also manically focused on providing the resources our team needed to meet our obligations and hit our number. But there was something else at play…
I went on to further explore this phenomena in my book, “The Transformational Entrepreneur”, published in 2011. In my book, I shared an observation; Sparking breakthrough performance in business is akin to lighting a fire. A fire needs heat, fuel and oxygen in order to burn. In business, leadership provides the heat, strategy is the fuel, and culture is the oxygen…we cannot see it, but it’s the air we all breathe. Take away any single element, and breakthrough performance is extinguished.
High performance companies optimize and align leadership, strategy and culture. Leadership can be relatively simple to measure, especially if said leader is responsible for a P&L. At one company I worked for, we used Economic Value Add as our leadership metric. Strategy is also fairly straight forward to measure. Through company performance and the attainment of your annual “Objectives”, your strategy metrics can be built right into your annual, Strategic Business Plan.
Which brings us to organizational culture…the air we all breathe. Culture is either contributing to your endeavors, or creating friction that is interfering with your success. It’s never neutral. For the first time in my 35 year career, we now have an independently validated, statistically significant set of tools for measuring, and improving, organizational culture.
Thanks to decades of lessons learned and applied, from peer-reviewed research canvasing Affective Neuroscience, Applied Behavioral Economics, the Six Dimensions of Emotional Style and years of developing psychometric questionnaires, we can now effectively measure culture in a statistically significant way. And more importantly, we can engineer organizational cultures that support high performance!
I’ll be exploring our toolset and approach in coming blogs. If you’d like to learn more, you’re always welcome to reach out to us!
Thanks!
Terry Murray
September 23, 2024
© 2024, Performance Transformation, Inc.
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