How to build a culture of excellence
■ Mark Wager is an international leadership expert who regularly runs programmes in Fiji.
Mark can be contacted at Mark@ Leadership.com.fj
There are many things a leader has to do to build a culture of excellence. When in a leadership position, there are times that there doesn’t seem to be enough hours in a day in order to achieve everything you want to, however, despite how busy you may get, you should never forget that the number one responsibility for any leader is creating a culture of excellence.
If you look at any team, the most significant factor in determining whether they will succeed or fail is the quality of the culture they find themselves in.
The better the culture, the better the results the team will achieve.
What is a culture of excellence?
Culture is defined as the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a group of people.
In other words, it’s basically the boundaries of what behaviours are acceptable and what behaviours are not.
Every team has a culture, whether it’s formally defined or not.
As soon as a group of people get together, they naturally and gradually form acceptable behaviours.
It’s human nature, yet it’s the role of a leader to help define and form this culture so that the team is as effective as possible.
So in this week’s article, I will share with you some practical tips on how you can build a culture of excellence.
Live the values.
The most important thing a leader needs to do when creating a culture of excellence is to live the values.
Every organisation has a set of values yet if you approach an average employee, they wouldn’t be able to name these values.
This is because values don’t exist on a piece of paper or a plaque in the reception. The true values exist in the behaviours of the leaders within the organisation.
There’s no point in having ‘respect’ as a value if leaders don’t treat people with respect.
If doing something is bad enough then giving an expectation that something will be done and then this expectation is not delivered, is even worse and is a recipe for poor team morale.
Define the successful behaviours
One of the key elements of the All Blacks rugby team is continued success while they focus on behaviours rather than the result.
This is why their goal is to have a perfect 80 minute performance instead of the traditional goal of winning the game or scoring a certain amount of points because if they have a perfect performance, make their tackles, pass the ball accurately and not give away many penalties then the score takes care of itself.
The advantage of this approach is that you are focusing only on what you can control and are not reliant on outside factors.
It’s highly effective yet it only works if you can correctly identify the behaviours that the team needs to maintain in order to obtain the desired results.
Involve the team
Successful teams have the values built downwards within an organisation while the culture is built upwards which means typically senior management set the values and these values should be fixed yet the culture which is how the values are interpreted and lived should be put together by the people who are expected to work with the culture.
Cultures, unlike values, should be fluid.
A culture should even evolve and change as new people come into the team.
Each new addition brings their own personal preferences and beliefs, also the interpretation of values change over time.
Just look how the typical workplace has changed over the past ten years. So it’s important that the culture evolves over time.
Provide clarification
When you are involving the team in creating your culture you need to ask one simple question.
‘What type of workplace do you want to work in?’
From this initial question, you can start building the type of workplace that will encourage excellence.
During the discussion the role of the leader is to provide clarity because people assume that they share the same definitions but this is not always true.
I was working with a team helping them develop a culture of excellence and one team member mentioned that the team should have open communication and everyone agreed, yet when I asked her to define what she meant by open communication, it soon became clear that within the team ‘open communication’ meant different things.
Establish a set of rules.
When you have the team establish the culture they want to work within, you need to ask the question ‘what do we have to do in order to have that culture?’
This will start a conversation about what the rules of the team will look like.
There are two main advantages for this approach.
Firstly, in my experience. the team will put together a set of stricter rules than they would if someone else set them and secondly people are far more likely to adhere to rules that they themselves put together.
I recommend that during this exercise you put extra emphasis on how people communicate with each other as this is the area that generates most conflict within teams.
Silence is agreement
If you do everything above, it will all be for nothing if you don’t maintain the culture and that can only be done by highlighting and praising the behaviours that take the team towards success and addressing the behaviours that take the team towards failure and here’s the key message. “Silence is agreement.”
If any undesirable behaviours occur or rules are broken, it’s essential that the leader speaks up because when they don’t, they are giving permission for the bad behaviour to continue.
Remember when I say address the situation this doesn’t necessarily mean disciplinary action.
It may be as simple as seeking clarification on why people did something.
I know these conversations are a challenge to a lot of people but it’s in these daily conversations like praising people, saying thank you, providing clarification on expectations that successful teams are made.
People generally want to come to work and do a good job.
In fact, I can’t remember a time when I met someone who deliberately wanted to do a bad job.
With this in mind, it’s the role of the leader to provide clarity on what a ‘good job’ looks like and the behaviours that will make this happen.
Achieve this and just like the All Blacks have discovered, the right culture gets the right results.
So build the right culture for excellence and the results will take care of themselves.