Why a High Performance Culture Starts and Ends with Leadership
While some may tell you that “culture” is a difficult word to define, especially in the context of “corporate culture:” and while it’s true that culture is so ingrained within an organization that it can be difficult to describe, we know that we can define culture as:
The shared, learned behaviors that that team members apply to every situation they encounter.
When we’re talking about “high performance culture,” we’re referring to a culture in which teams are highly focused on achieving goals and exceeding expectations, contributing their full potential (not just 70% of it). Building a high performance culture requires strong leadership to dictate initiatives – here’s why:
Leaders Set the Example
Great leaders personally model the behaviors they expect to see from teams. If you want your team to be dedicated to a specific goal — excelling at customer service, surpassing sales quotas, learning new skills, and beyond — then you have to be the embodiment of that dedication. For example, let’s say you decide to implement a system for “bottom-up” feedback in which individual contributors assess their manager’s behavior. As the leader, you should ask for this feedback about yourself before passing the directive down to individual managers and their teams. This way, the managers will have participated in the exercise and seen its benefits. By leading through example, you’ve gotten the team to buy in. When building a high-performance culture in which the leadership has high expectations of team members, it’s important for the leaders themselves to embody high-performance characteristics, otherwise no one will.
Leaders Motivate Teams
To achieve goals, teams must feel personally invested and engaged – and the leader needs to motivate teams to get them to that level. As a motivator, a leader shows individuals that they can personally make a difference with respect to an outcome, that an objective is obtainable, and that the true importance of achieving the objective is both personally and corporately important. When teams are bought into these three items, they are fully engaged in driving results.
A motivational leader must have a charismatic personality to attract others and create a desire to follow the leader and be part of greater visions and plans. Fortunately, charisma is a learnable skill. Here are 10 steps to get you started:
- Smile a lot, be friendly.
- Be decisive. Decide, then let “yes” be yes, and “no” be no.
- Be knowledgeable. Do your homework.
- Listen, listen, listen. Let others fully express themselves, always, before responding.
- Have ideas. Come prepared.
- Speak clearly, and with conviction.
- Encourage others.
- Create an atmosphere of fun. People enjoy being happy.
- Speak truth always.
- Have and share enthusiasm.
Continually assessing yourself in these 10 areas gives you the opportunity to build your charismatic personality and apply each area when motivating your team. Remember, motivation shouldn’t be saved for the beginning or end of a journey, but offered freely throughout it.
High Performance Relies on Leader-driven Goals
A vision can only be achieved by logically stringing together a series of individual goals. Because this greater vision comes from the leader, so too must the individual goals. But general goal statements such as “increase sales” are not powerful enough to help your team achieve results. Instead, goals should meet these four requirements:
- Specific: Goals should have a specific, deadly-accurate deadline–not a fuzzy or flexible one.
- Measurable: A well-thought out goal is one in which there is some way to measure the outcome.
- Crystal Clear: Goals should be expressed so simply and so clearly they are truly “crystal clear” to everyone. Any questions should be addressed and the goal statement clarified.
- Action-oriented: Goals describe what is to be done; they should not be expressions of intent or desire.
Once goals are set, it’s the leader’s job to ensure that pathways to achieving that goal aren’t getting convoluted and off track. It’s the leader’s directive that reinforces the vision and its underlying goals, helping the team stay focused and perform optimally.
Leaders Empower Teams and Individuals
In truly high-performing teams, individuals use their knowledge and skills to contribute to the fullest. To act in this way, they must be working in an empowered environment, where they are told what needs to be achieved but given the freedom to determine how tasks should be done. In fact, empowered employees can improve business processes because their day-to-day task-completing experiences are different than those of leadership. Recognizing this gives leaders the opportunity to take advantage of an individual’s full abilities.
But an empowered team must still be managed to ensure the highest performance. Here are the five steps to take:
- Initiate frequent, honest, open communication.
- Initiate discussion to identify problems, ideas, progress.
- Provide and reinforce a clear focused vision and direction.
- Ensure relevant training is applied.
- Clearly define boundaries, and then allow freedom of action within those boundaries.
Combining empowered teams with a guiding leader is a recipe for high-performance every time.
Leaders Must Communicate Effectively
One common thread sewn throughout each leadership quality is that of communication. Clear and simple messages help you inform and educate your team to achieve results.
To communicate effectively, follow these steps:
- Give context: Your listener lacks the background (past), or vision (future) you have. With this context, your message is more logical and informative. Without it, the message may fall on deaf ears. Briefly give the essential context to your audience, but remember, you should be having a conversation, not delivering a lecture.
- Speak from knowledge: When speaking, what you say must be credible. Your content must be based on accurate, verifiable, and compelling information. The greater the credibility, the greater the effectiveness of the communication.
- Speak from conviction, with passion: People are informed by information (head), but really moved to action and commitment by emotion (heart). Fire kindles fire. Your communication needs always to motivate, not just inform.
- Simplify: A complicated message gets lost. Less information, presented clearly and with repetition, can be better absorbed by your audience and is therefore more effective.
When you’re building a culture of high performance, solid leadership is the essential foundation upon which results are based. Without a motivational, goal-setting leader who clearly communicates to the team, there is no hope for a sound structure.
