How can your practice's culture drive business success?

Building a winning team, forming a combination where people thrive to produce results takes a lot of effort and commitment from top leadership. Alignment with organizational goals is super important. A distant reality or multi-verse within the organization is recipe of disaster. CSAT combined with healthy P&L helps reminding people the core values and nurture the good culture. Struggling businesses and building success culture is a battle - not to be won by many. Ethical behaviors, positive attitude, continuous learning, celebrating minor and major wins, proactively manage conflicts and issues, focus on leadership development, helping key people in their personal lives are some fundamental factors that helps build the success culture.

It's important to understand what culture we need that derived from a set mission and vision. There are times we thought we need s high performing culture, but we ended up realized my desired culture is different from what I need. This is the part to determine the rest of the element in change - i.e. system, people, process, policy, environment and etc. If done wrongly means we ended at wrong path or many reworks to happen.

Cultural assessment is now a common practice that has several specialists and measurement grids to provide gradings. But because culture is hard to measure in quantitative matters, the very frameworks used for its measurement may vary from one case to the other. Instead of focusing on grids and scales where to position an organization, a measurement based on key behaviors and language can be more inspiring, especially if it can be linked to strong organizational anchors, such as motos, targets, or even slogan's.

After assessing current state, of course next is future state or even ideal state. Then, the gap could be quite visible that may help us to see clearly feasibility of change, and perhaps at what cost. Other aspect, if you can't define it, then it could result to a less convincing change story creation.

Role modeling is important in this case. Its like the law of attraction, when on behave correctly it's behavior; however, when this get spread to others and others behave the same way, finally the culture is formed. Leaders attitude and behavior play important role, when they walk the talk and model the way, the other people shared the same values will be attracted.

Culture could be like a belief of individuals, if there are more converter due to the strategy of change driven, then it means more effective. Then the outcome measurement come into picture for us to identify "how deep the change instill" and is this what we wanted from day one

One thing I came to realize is that there is no such thing as a replicable success culture. Though best practices like "hiring the right talent" and "continuous learning" are good for any culture, they take form in different ways, and what will work for one organization might be detrimental to the other. Instead of replicating best practices, first identify the reason why a certain practice is required, what it is expected to deliver, and how it relates to the organizational history, because people will need to be taken along. Yet, unlike skills, personalities are hard (but no impossible) to change. As such, in addition to implementing new behaviors, sometimes it is also required to implement... new people. Hire for fit first, not training.