Four Steps to an Excellent Culture
Engaged Team
The days of just building a better mousetrap are over. Today you need a team of people that are not just talented and engaged, they are FAST, MOBILE, QUICK TO CHANGE, QUICKER TO LEARN, HATE LOSING AND LOVE TO WIN. With Gallup reporting that 59% of the global workforce has QUIETLY QUIT and only 23% are fully engaged, the state of your business culture is more important today than ever before.
Engagement vs. Effectiveness
While everyone talks about culture, only elite leaders know that it’s not about warm and fuzzy feelings, cool work spaces, casual dress codes, free beer on Friday nights or even high employee engagement alone. It’s about EFFECTIVENESS and RESULTS. It’s about getting the job done, winning the race, celebrating the victory and then doing it again. Great cultures outpace competitors, produce superior products and services with excellent safety and exceptional performance. They do it all with people who love what they’re doing and are passionate about WINNING TOGETHER.
What REALLY Drives People and Performance
Your Culture is nothing more than the shared beliefs, attitudes, mindsets, habits and customs that drive how your people think and behave at work. It’s about what’s inside of their souls and how it relates to serving your customers, mission, revenue, bottom line and most of all each other. The greatest enemies of an excellent culture are fast growth and more people. The more successful your team or organization becomes and the faster it grows, the more your people get so busy doing their jobs that they forget how to do what made you successful in the first place. You can manage this if you know how and have the tools to do it.
That’s why, like an iceberg, the real drivers of business culture lie below the surface.
The Culture Monster
The culture monster is the way we describe the dark force that lurks below the surface of every team or organization. He’s the dark side of every human being that comes out when we’re stressed out, over tired, over sold on our own greatness or just plain frustrated with our lousy boss and all the corporate politics that are appearing more and more every day.
He’s waiting behind the water cooler to consume your creative ideas, kill your team spirit and eat your best strategies for breakfast in ways that remain invisible and undetected without the proper discovery and transformational tools. Excellent Cultures’ tools and expertise give you the ability to not only see him, but to root him out and wound him beyond repair.
While every leader or project is as unique and different as you are, Nearly Five Decades of Established Results have defined Proven Best Practices that when customized to the uniqueness of you and your team have produced some amazing results:
Four Proven Steps
Guiding You to an Excellent Culture
Step 1. Measure & Benchmark
Lack of ownership is the primary reason for the failure of all organizational change initiatives. Our experts use a simple data driven scientific process to get you past this. In most cases we can diagnose your below the surface monsters within a few minutes of processing and reviewing your data.
We use tools that were developed by time-tested research psychologists to diagnose what’s going on. We help you interpret the areas that need improvement, and in some cases areas that you’ve focused on too much that need less attention. The really amazing part about this part of the process is the way our experts help your entire team take FULL OWNERSHIP and ACCOUNTABILITY to change what needs to change. This is done through a process called a STRATEGIC CULTURE ASSESSMENT AND STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP.
Step 2. Equip & Empower Change
Most leaders spend 90% of their time trying to change things that can’t be changed. They get so frustrated that they pay no attention to what they can change that will make a positive difference. To compound this, ineffective leaders make the problem worse by trying to sell people on change driven from above or force them into it which never works and destroys your employee engagement as well as effectiveness.
This is why time-tested expertise is so important to your ultimate success. This part of the process engages your entire team in identifying what can and cannot be changed. Self-assessing with our data tools then identifies what they each need to change as their part of the process. It then equips them with the tools to make these desired changes reality with lots of speed and enthusiasm. Everyone doing this together adds momentum and effectiveness. This is all done interactively onsite in the ACHIEVING EXCELLENT CULTURE WORKSHOP.
Step 3. Change How Leaders Lead
Leading research has revealed that over 70 percent of leaders lead in a manner that actually causes defensive behavior as a direct result of how they lead. Not only do these leaders not have the slightest idea that they are doing this, they have no idea what to change to fix it. Our data driven scientific tools cut to the chase so our expert coaches can help your leaders build and execute their own plans causing these changes fast. Engaging their people in owning their part of the process gets everyone fully onboard. Follow-up assessment scorecards tell each leader with simple, straightforward data what’s working and what’s not working. This ensures both positive changes in how they are leading as well as improved effectiveness with accountability by their people. Data driven assessments guarantee sustainability. This process is called LEADERSHIP CALIBRATION.
Step 4. Operationalize & Sustain
Once your leaders have seen what’s under the surface and changed it, sustainability becomes the priority. At this point, our data driven process, expert coaches and proven tools turn your new winning culture into a sustainable ongoing part of your business, team or organization. Customized proprietary software transforms your mission, values, goals, objectives and systems into simple measurable behaviors that are owned and lived by all of your people with full accountability.
Fast, easy, regular customized 360 reviews leave out the warm and fuzzy language and give each leader and employee simple scoreboards that measure their progress or slippage utilizing the MEASURABLE BEHAVIOR SCORECARD process.
Since the data tells the whole story and your people have created and fully own it, true accountability becomes the norm for all. Now you have a culture where every employee actively participates in holding their colleagues and peers accountable to make corrections and improvements every single day. Defensive criticism becomes constructive improvement with every team member committed to helping each other be the best they can be. Your entire process is managed and sustained by your own GUIDING COALITION for guaranteed enduring transformation.
Outcomes You Can Expect
Engagement That Produces Effectiveness
Highly Engaged employees who love what they’re doing and have a fundamental belief and passion to be all that they can be. Excellent Cultures Clients report engagement as high as 95% with track records of moving from #27 to #1 in Global Companies like Toyota.
Innovation
You only stay in front by coming up with ideas that your competitors haven’t thought of yet along with the people who implement them.
Empowerment
Enlightened leaders who understand and utilize leadership methods unique to their own personal style that cause ongoing positive performance, sustainable results and team members who are motivated to outperform previous contribution levels.
Success
Ensured long-term success of your best and most valued people, record engagement, increased teamwork, employee retention and team spirit.
Results
Doubled Sales and Bottom Lines, 95% Employee Engagement, Millions in Cost Savings, Tripple to Quadruple Digit ROI’s. Hear the real results from some of our clients.
Get Started
Since every project is as unique and different as you and your team or organization, the most important first step to your Excellent Culture is a conversation with one of our strategic consultants. We’d love to hear your story. Tell us what’s working for you as well as what’s not working, where you feel you’re stuck and what really needs to change and we’ll do our best to serve you.
