A few years ago, mentioning “corporate culture” in the same sentence with “increased profitability,” “growth,” “customer satisfaction,” or any other critical business metric was likely to prompt listeners to roll their eyes. Isn’t that just motivational fluff? Soft stuff?!
Now everyone talks culture. We recognize a connection between a lot of bad behavior and culture—on Wall Street, in the NBA, at Volkswagen. As culture has become recognized for the powerful, shaping force that it is, the market has been flooded with self-proclaimed culture experts promising they can help transform your organization’s culture.
Mood Ring Consultants
Many consultants fall into the trap of promising quick, one-solution-fits-all fixes, pointing to employee happiness as both the harbinger and mediator of your business success. Improve your employees’ mood, they say, and you’re on your way to high performance.
If only it were that simple!
Denison began gathering detailed data on how culture impacts organizational performance well before it became an industry standard for best practice. Indeed, we pioneered much of the research that brought culture into prominence among high performing business. We’ve learned to recognize the drivers of high performance culture because we’ve seen them again and again, in every industry, sector, and region of the world.
Mission Control, not Mood Control
High performance culture is about adaptability, mission, consistency, and involvement. It requires vision and teamwork. And teamwork is about such things as high expectations, accountability, delivering on commitments, and working together, hard, to deliver superior performance.
Denison can help you determine your organization’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of these established, critical success factors. We can give you the support you need to understand, make sense of, and ultimately manage your culture. It’s not motivational fluff. It is real work, based on real data, that delivers real results.
This post is adapted from the article by Bryan Adkins, EdD, CEO Denison Consulting: “High Performance Culture: It’s Easy!”
