We often use the word ‘culture’ in a loose way and assume that culture across an organisation is homogenous. Although culture can be deeply ingrained, it is usually more accurate to understand it as a collection of separate cultures, including an executive culture, a sales culture, micro cultures in different offices and teams – it is complex. If thinking about driving a culture of collaboration, it is more useful to think through the lens of behaviour impacting outcomes. It is then about how you influence behaviour and align to the optimal direction of travel.
Influencing behaviour is not achieved through a single channel or communication method, such as townhalls or blogs. Using multiple communication techniques can have more impact on an individual basis. New CEOs and leaders often assume everyone has the same learning style and there can be a massive overreliance on things like PowerPoint presentations. Often, individual conversations are more effective in changing behaviours and aligning constituencies. Once the direction is set, assessing behaviours of individuals and groups regularly then becomes important, and regular honest conversations can keep everyone on track.
Understanding why behaviour may be misaligned is imperative. People may not understand the reason for unhelpful behaviours; some blockers may be historical resentment, some may be incentive issues. Understanding, explaining and compartmentalising objectives into a small number of targets is then important. Frequent coaching to support this defined set of goals then leads to improvement.
You also have agency risk - where managers are not owners of a business. This can lead to behaviour being aligned to what suits them rather than the optimal outcome for the business - talking about this openly is okay and important. Make people aware. An overreliance on metaphors from sport and military can be an issue but lots of lessons to learn from high performance environments in this regard. A major one is how do you earn your position on the team and how daily behaviours influence individual and team performance.
