Introduction

Every organization has a unique combination of leadership characteristics and employee behaviors that contribute to the shared values and standards that are expressed and acted on. At Eagle’s Flight, we have identified several types of corporate culture that can be cultivated to create a higher-performing workplace. Of course, not every corporate culture is suited to a particular organization, as each comes with its own set of benefits and potential detriments to be monitored.

4 Types of Corporate Culture

This list of pros and cons for four different types of corporate culture outlines how they can foster, or potentially hinder, organizational excellence.

1. Culture of Accountability

In this type of corporate culture, individuals feel accountable for both their own work and that of their teams. As such, they feel empowered to take ownership and trust that their colleagues do the same.

Pros:

• Potential issues are identified before they become real problems
• Employees feel comfortable coming to leadership with new concepts
• Individuals are motivated to share ideas that might improve the organization

Cons:

• The word “accountability” can sometimes have negative connotations to employees
• A heavy focus on accountability for poor decisions can decrease morale

In a culture of accountability that functions well, every team member actively and willingly contributes to the success of the organization, because they understand that their contributions have value. On the other hand, organizations that place too much emphasis on accountability for negative outcomes can experience a decrease in performance, as employees are less willing to risk testing new methods and ideas.

2. Culture of Innovation

In organizations that depend on innovation to maintain success in the marketplace, it is essential to integrate team members with diverse skill sets and provide the tools and processes that enable them to develop and implement new ideas.

Pros:

• A shared commitment to innovation at every level of the organization
• Competitive advantage in the marketplace
• An inclusive environment that welcomes all ideas

Cons:

• Internal competition can become unhealthy if not handled appropriately
• There is potential to create a culture of secrecy

Creating a successful culture of innovation depends on empowering teams to be creative and giving them the necessary resources to execute their ideas in a safe environment. However, too much emphasis on competition between teams can lead to secrecy and ultimately hinder performance by preventing knowledge from being shared.

3. Culture of Safety

Industries that require work that poses potential safety risks to individuals and the environment can benefit from a culture in which employees inherently protect not just themselves but also their teammates and their surroundings.

Pros:

• Cost savings due to fewer safety incidents
• Inherent knowledge that the organization values employee safety
• A proactive approach to safety and compliance

Cons:

• Lost productivity if employees don’t have proper training for operating both efficiently and safely
• A strong focus on adhering to strict protocols and regulations can limit innovation

A culture of safety contributes to high performance while mitigating risk and maintaining compliance. However, an organization that also wants to promote innovation must balance internal communication and training in a way that allows individuals to experiment with new ideas while also considering their own well-being and that of those around them.

4. Culture of High-Performance Sales

Organizations with a large salesforce benefit from having a common culture that supports the activities that generate revenue by providing access to the necessary information and resources to promote new products and services.

Pros:

• An informed salesforce that can successfully promote the organization’s products and services

• A commitment from leadership and employees to support the salesforce
• Accountability in setting and exceeding sales goals

Cons:

• Potential competition that results in not sharing knowledge or resources
• Loss of focus on customer centricity

A culture of high-performance sales has the potential to increase revenue, but without a tandem focus on truly satisfying customer needs, the team might not be able to achieve long-term success.

Balance Is the Key

When undergoing any type of culture transformation, consider both the desired positive impacts and the potential negative effects that might arise. Understanding the possible pitfalls can help you address them through organizational training, internal communication, and behavior modeling.

Your organization’s strategy carries more impact when it can be executed. Authors of the notable book on strategy execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, wrote in Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, that “execution is a specific set of behaviors and techniques that companies need to master to have competitive advantage.” It’s true that you need to have the right strategy in place to achieve organizational goals, but you also need to have the right behaviors and tactics in place to execute that strategy.

In a PWC strategy and execution survey, 55 percent of executives expressed concern that their company lacked the proper focused on strategy execution. Furthermore, the researchers behind the survey found in many of the surveyed companies, that their “strategies often just aren’t implementable and aren’t designed to win.” To “win” and effectively move from a great strategy to executional excellence, you’ll need to evaluate your processes and leadership behaviors to assess whether you’re properly equipped to execute your strategy.

Using the Sterling Silver CordTM  to Achieve Strategy Excellence

Strategy execution—predictably getting the right things done in the best possible way—requires great skill, commitment, and rigor. A useful tool for helping individuals achieve executional excellence is the five-step Sterling Silver Cord™. Through these five steps, individuals gain useful techniques for moving from strategy (through plans, checkpoints, and innovations) to tactics, resulting in executional excellence.

Step 1: Identify the strategy. Picture a cord with five nodes along its length. Imagine this represents five disciplines a leader must excel at when faced with a challenge. Whether it takes 5 seconds or 5 months to decide upon the right approach depends on the magnitude of the challenge. Ultimately, your chosen approach becomes your strategy.

Step 2: Develop plans. To bring the strategy to life, it’s helpful to visualize the desired outcome. By developing a clear picture of the goal to be accomplished, everyone involved with the strategy and its execution gains a complete understanding and can agree on what the outcome will look like once executed.

Step 3: Visit checkpoints. When you’re going full steam ahead toward execution of a goal, it’s helpful to periodically review and critique your progress. As you visit checkpoints along the way, you’ll have opportunities to evaluate the need for course corrections and recalculate the timing of upcoming milestones.

Step 4: Innovate. As you’re moving along the path toward execution, unforeseen obstacles may appear that put the desired outcome at risk. At this stage, you’ll need to innovate—with new ideas or the addition of new resources—to move the strategy and plans back in line. For example, the execution of a new product launch may be progressing nicely, until a new user feedback report comes in. This new information might require making a design change or adding some new product functionality to ensure a successful execution that meets the needs of your customers.

Step 5: Execute tactics. Strategy, plans, checkpoints, and innovation will set you up for success, but you haven’t yet reached the finish line. To execute means to get the task done, whether you’re the one employing the necessary tactics or you’re working as part of a team. No matter the tactical actors working toward execution, consistently making it happen closes the loop of executional excellence.

Strategy Excellence as a Key Principle of Leadership

Getting things done is an important principle of leadership because without execution, your organization can’t meet its obligations to customers, shareholder, or employees. The Sterling Silver CordTM highlights the reality that there are specific behaviors leaders can exhibit to drive executional excellence throughout teams and the broader organization. Leadership development can help individuals learn and practice the behaviors required to achieve executional excellence, so that strategy becomes more than just a great idea—it translates into action.

A collaborative workforce in which individuals work together to achieve a common goal is more likely to function as a productive, high-performing team. In a survey of C-suite executives, 73 percent said that their company would be even more successful if employees worked more collaboratively. Furthermore, 56 percent of respondents said the number one factor that would have the greatest impact on overall profitability was collaboration between employees. In a collaborative workplace, individuals don’t just exercise strong teamwork skills some of the time; they operate in a culture where collaboration is consistent and evident in their everyday behaviors. Here are the seven characteristics of a workforce that is truly collaborative.

Strong Leadership

Leaders set the tone for employee behavior, helping to encourage and guide collaboration within and between teams. They also communicate expectations for teamwork and coach individuals to be better at working together. Research conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity found that the top behaviors of collaborative leaders include:

• Modeling collaborative behaviors through their own example
• Building strong internal networks and frequently working with individuals in other departments and roles
• Rewarding others who engage in collaborative behaviors

By engaging in these activities, collaborative leaders can help the organization resist the formation of silos and build a culture in which collaboration occurs naturally.

Clearly Defined Roles for Subgroups

When each team has clarity about their role in helping the company achieve its goals, collaboration is not only more possible, but is likely to be more rewarding for everyone involved. Instead of individuals quickly growing frustrated about duplicated efforts or a ball that’s been dropped, they can more easily share information and ideas when they’re clear about where team accountabilities lie and who’s responsible for what. Individuals in a collaborative workforce understand how their respective roles fit together.

Consistent, United, and Enthusiastic Effort

Although results are always important, individuals in a truly collaborative workforce also maintain a united and enthusiastic effort throughout the life of any activity. That united effort is important because if any person or team loses enthusiasm for the shared goal or begins to give less than their best effort, the whole organization can suffer. Everyone working together as a team from the beginning to the end of each task, project, or quarter ensures a consistent effort.

Effective and Frequent Communication

Collaboration can’t happen without effective communication between teams and individuals. No person or team within the organization can be an island, and frequent communication is what helps people learn, make progress on key projects, and overcome obstacles. When everyone is communicating, each person has the chance to share their ideas and talents with the broader team, and there is less risk of confusion about expectations and deliverables.

Shared Resources

Each team and individual possesses resources that can be helpful to others, and it’s not just information. Resources such as time, ideas, and experience are also routinely shared in a truly collaborative work environment. No one ever said it was easy to share resources, especially when you feel time-constrained. However, when resources are shared rather than consistently held close to the vest, the whole team ultimately benefits.

Periodic and Temporary Suppression of the Ego

Having a healthy ego and a strong sense of confidence is great. However, sometimes collaboration requires that the ego take a backseat so that others can have a voice, apply their talents, and contribute to the team. In a collaborative workforce, it’s ideal for every member of the team to share their ideas and contributions, rather than just one person or a handful of people.

Unanimous Focus on a Common Goal

When people see that they are working toward a common goal, they’re more likely to work together to achieve it. A collaborative workforce is able to look beyond personal agendas and competition between teams and recognize that each person and team has a unique role to play in meeting the common goal. When everyone is unanimously focused on the shared goal, a sense of camaraderie develops and people begin to see that they are “all in this together.”

When you build a truly collaborative workforce, you can achieve a range of benefits, such as productive employees, more cohesive teams, and a more effective organization. A good way to get started in developing the characteristics of a collaborative workforce is through employee learning and development that helps to build leadership, communication, and teamwork skills throughout the entire workforce.

Achieving employee engagement is a commitment that starts with leadership. Every leader in the organization has an impact—good or bad—on the teams they lead, and this influences individual engagement. Factors such as the overall success of the business, an individual manager’s leadership style, and specific issues on a team can all affect employee engagement. In order to get every individual to contribute their best efforts, leaders must have the ability to recognize the factors that cause employees to participate and those that cause them to disengage.

Engagement isn’t magic—it’s craft. It requires open communication, clearly articulated goals, and unambiguous expectations. Therefore, if you are wondering how you can improve employee engagement, building strong leadership skills will be key to success. Here’s how they can support the achievement of your goals:

1. Improving Engagement through Communication

Leaders must learn how to communicate clearly and effectively. This includes sharing goals, strategies, and the rationales behind decisions so that employees can understand why they are asked to do certain tasks. It’s also important for leadership to share success stories, both at the individual and organizational levels. For example, recognizing individual achievements on a team can be very motivating for everybody in the company. It’s also important not to assume that everybody in the company is aware of successes at the organizational level, such as awards, news items, or charitable donations.

Within the organization, communication between leadership and employees should be two-way. When employees have the opportunity to provide honest feedback to leadership, they become more engaged because they believe that their opinions matter. This can be accomplished through employee surveys, one-on-one conversations, and small group discussions.

Practical strategies for improving employee engagement through communication include:

• Committing to consistent, periodic updates about the organizational big picture
• Scheduling regular feedback sessions between leaders and employees that go beyond just an annual review
• Implementing technology (messaging apps, internal social platforms, etc.) that will foster better communication among peers

2. Improving Engagement through Clear Goals

Sharing organizational goals helps employees understand their roles in achieving them. You can then use these larger goals to formulate attainable objectives at the individual level. Setting individual goals that align with organizational objectives fosters better engagement by highlighting exactly how each employee is contributing. This practice also gives every employee something for which to be accountable.

Articulating a compelling vision not only ensures individual alignment with organizational objectives, it also instills a sense of purpose among employees, which contributes to greater job satisfaction.

Practical strategies for improving employee engagement through setting clear goals include:

• Writing down the most important organizational goals and posting them in a place where every employee will see them on a regular basis
• Frequently referencing company goals in internal communications
• Having each employee set individual objectives based on the common company goal, and using those goals to coach against
• Following up on each person’s goals throughout the year and seeking ways to support their success

3. Improving Engagement through Unambiguous Expectations

When it’s not clear who is responsible for what, it’s easy for employees to disengage. On the other hand, when individuals know that they are accountable for specific outcomes, they are more likely to fully engage to meet those expectations. Leaders can demonstrate accountability through their own behavior by always delivering on their commitments.

Practical strategies for improving employee engagement through unambiguous expectations include:

• Defining the expected outcomes, including timelines, for each employee objective
• Tracking progress with regular check-ins between managers and employees
• Publicly recognizing individuals when they meet the defined expectations to reinforce the desired behavior

Conclusion: Improving Employee Engagement Is a Process

These three approaches work together to improve employee engagement. Using effective communication to create individual goals and define expectations gives employees a clear path forward. They know what is expected of them and, equally importantly, why they are doing it. Engagement starts with leadership, and if your leaders don’t yet have the necessary skills to deploy these strategies, it require updating your leadership development program.

The role of Human Resources in organizational transformation efforts is an important one. HR acts as a powerful change agent and advisor to company leaders. According to Gartner research, 66 percent of organizational change factors relate to talent, requiring the full involvement of HR to pull together the people and resources needed to make transformation efforts a success. Though it may be tempting to think of HR as the prime driver of organizational transformation, senior leaders are responsible for establishing the vision and championing organizational change, with HR acting as a critical enabler of change. Here are four key areas in which HR plays an important role in supporting organizational transformation and helping to make it a reality.

Employee Training and Development

The role of HR is to understand the unique learning needs of the workforce. During an organizational transformation, HR ensures that leaders receive the necessary training to be more effective in leading change and that all employees have opportunities to expand their skills in relevant areas, such as teamwork, communication, or customer service, just to name a few. Employees need new skills and knowledge to change their behavior, and HR can identify training partners and solutions that will address learning requirements as the organization evolves. With a culture transformation, for example, HR can evaluate and identify an enterprise-wide solution that incorporates coaching, targeted skill-building, and training reinforcement to ensure lasting behavior change.

Workplace Communication

Effective communication is necessary for any initiative to take hold within an organization, and HR is an important catalyst for ensuring that all individuals involved have the information they need. HR also supports workplace communication by ensuring that the appropriate feedback loops are in place so that individuals have opportunities to express their views and ask questions. HR can enhance two-way communication in support of organizational transformation in the following ways:

• Helping to craft employee communications from senior leaders
• Participating in town halls and team meetings
• Advising leaders, from the CEO to the frontline, and helping them to deliver consistent messages at every level of the organization

Tracking Progress and Sharing Feedback

HR helps to develop, drive, and monitor the agenda for change, keeping leaders informed and helping those who derail get back on track. Different functions and teams will have different experiences as organizational transformation gets underway, and HR is well-positioned to monitor each team’s success, making sure that implementation across departments and functions is consistent. Because HR is often central to transformation activities, HR professionals are able to see each team’s progress with clarity and can deliver feedback that will help managers guide their teams more effectively.

Linking Talent Management Programs

During an organizational transformation, HR needs to ensure that each stage of the HR Cycle—including recruitment, rewards and recognition, and performance management—aligns with the goals of the transformation. When talent management programs are aligned to the new state of the organization, people have greater clarity regarding performance expectations and opportunities for growth. Some examples of how HR can link talent management programs to organizational transformation efforts include:

• Ensuring that recruitment efforts and job postings incorporate the skills and competencies required for success in the new organizational culture
• Revising succession plans to ensure individuals who embody the new company culture are positioned for leadership roles
• Integrating new organizational values into the performance review process

As business partners and advisors, HR is at the heart of any initiative that impacts the mindset and behavior of employees. Therefore, the role of human resources in organizational transformation should be to ensure that individuals have the necessary tools and resources to understand the need for change and take ownership of their role in making organizational change a success. On an ongoing basis, HR helps leaders instill new values across their teams and supports employees along every step of the HR Cycle.

The New York Times recently published an article on Google and its quest to “build a better boss.” Google’s quest to build its leadership skills is critical given Eagle’s Flight’s own findings that individual employee contribution can be 30 to 40% higher when working for a world-class leader.

Imagine! Simply by improving leadership skills, every one of your managers’ direct reports’ contribution can be increased by as much as 40%! That’s 40% more contribution for the same employee salary – every year, year after year. What an incredible boost to productivity.

The Google quest also highlights the fact that leadership is not in fact one skill but several. Google’s research identified “Eight Good Behaviors.” To be a world-class leader, one cannot just learn one or two behaviors and become proficient in those. One must be proficient in each one individually while having them working in harmony with one another.

Building a Leadership Web

Learning to be a world-class leader is like creating a magnificent spider’s web. It’s done one strand at a time and requires patience. Like a spider web, each leadership strand must also be interconnected and serve to reinforce the whole. At Eagle’s Flight, our approach to leadership development is an integrated one, linking together content from each learning module. For example, being a good coach and providing specific constructive feedback requires a leader be a good communicator in both listening and in sharing information.

World-class leadership qualities like Google’s “Eight Good Behaviors” must be taught in such a way as to work together in tandem with one another. Here’s how the eight behaviors link to Eagle’s Flight’s integrated approach to leadership development:

1. Be a good coach: Outcome-based Leadership
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage: Leading an Empowered Workforce
3. Express interest in team member’s success and personal well-being: Leader’s Triad
4. Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented: Leader’s Imperatives
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team: Insightment
6. Help your employees with career development: Accelerating Performance
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team: Executional Excellence
8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team: Powering Team Performance

When Eagle’s Flight designs a world class leadership development initiative, we cover our clients’ most crucial competency areas first, and then, as the strands of the web are developed over time, we link the leadership competencies together to reinforce the nature and importance of an integrated web.