Best Practices vs Best Results: 3 Strategies to Bridge the Gap

Accelerated by the effects of the global pandemic, companies woke up to the realization that the quality of life of their human capital plays a central role in the net results of an organization, for better or worse.

Since then, organizations and institutions worldwide have poured millions of dollars into highlighting the net positive effects of best business practices on business outcomes.

E.g.

For decades, the attributes regarded as central to being a successful company have mirrored the qualities prized in leaders: focusing on earnings, demanding results, exercising authority and control, and being fiercely competitive.

For organizations to thrive now, all of these leadership characteristics must evolve.

This means making five fundamental shifts in mindsets and working methods for leaders. These shifts don’t mean abandoning your traditional skills. Instead, these shifts build on those skills to substantially expand your capacity as a leader. In other words, you are moving “beyond” the current norm “to” an evolved ambition that’s needed to lead thriving organizations in this new disruptive era.

 We define the five shifts as beyond profit to impact; beyond expectations to wholeness; beyond command to collaboration; beyond control to evolution; and beyond competition to cocreation. Taken together, the five shifts redefine leadership for a new era.

Source: mckinsey.com        

McKinsey research has found that thriving stars achieve high levels of sustained performance because of multiple factors: they are adaptable and resilient, they have found meaning and purpose at work, they achieve work-life balance and flexibility, and they experience psychological safety and trust from leaders, allowing them to create the same for their teams.

Additionally, research on thriving indicates that globally, aligning employment with modifiable factors of health can not only lead to?years of higher-quality life but also create trillions of dollars in economic value.

Here's the central question:

If that's what the research suggests, why does the reality of thousands of employees and their respective companies' cultures tell a different story?

Let's explore 3 possible causes and what to do about them:

ISOLATION:

By design, leaders must be somewhat detached from the company's day-to-day; effective leadership often requires strategic analysis and agile execution to maximize opportunities while minimizing risks.

This can create information silos that limit the leaders' ability to acknowledge and even understand what goes on two or three layers below in the organization.

Add a culture that lacks a healthy level of psychological safety, and leaders can be easily misled into believing that everything is working out "just fine" while the inner workings of the organization tell a very different story, one that many leaders never get to hear and consequently don't even have the opportunity to address.

What to do:

• If you're the leader: Ensure the company's culture is built around respect, trust, and open communication. This enables people to be honest with you -especially when there's trouble.-
• If you're the manager: If you see a mismatch between the leader's perspective and the organization's reality, speak up. Arrive prepared and -if you have them- propose potential solutions to facilitate the decision-making process.
• If you're an individual contributor: Ask questions, aim to understand the underlying company dynamics and what emerges from them, embody the values that you'd like to see in the company's culture, and voice your concerns with discernment and respect; it's an effective approach to get a thoughtful answer-back.

MISALIGNMENT

Building and or transforming a company's culture is a huge undertaking; it takes an in-depth knowledge of the organization, the industry, and its people. It's highly dynamic, and its success demands high levels of adaptability and flexibility while maintaining a steadfast approach toward growth and continuous development at the organizational and individual levels.

This means that without a full commitment and real engagement across a company's whole ecosystem, the entire initiative will fall short of its desired outcomes.

What does this look like in the current business landscape?

Companies considered "deliberately developmental" have managed to integrate culture design as their core tenant to maximize their returns and unlock their people's potential simultaneously.

In their book An Everyone Culture, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa L. Lahey present multiple examples of deliberately developmental companies in action, showing us the why's and how's of what putting the culture at the epicenter of an organization looks like in real life, and -perhaps- why your organization should do it too. (Yes, these companies tend to outperform their competitors).

What to do:

• If you're the leader: Asses clearly what kind of culture your organization embodies; the goal is to map out what to maintain, what to transform, and where to begin; to achieve it, question your assumptions and test your biases; remember that in a VUCA world, adaptability is the order of the day.
• If you're the manager: Pay close attention to the day-to-day dynamics between colleagues, teams, and departments. Find out what these behaviors mean, what they say about the current culture and the gap between the status quo and the desired outcome. The clarity you gain from this exercise may be an important first step towards developing an action plan, ideally company-wide, but if that isn't an option, start with your team or department; it does make a difference.
• If you're an individual contributor: It's important to ensure we're not actively contributing to a culture that we believe isn't conducive to achieving our real potential (and everyone else's). Large-scale transformations start small, almost individual by individual; therefore, embodying the values we'd like to see in the workplace is crucial. Once that's taken care of, an important next step is to communicate effectively with others, including our colleagues, peers, and managers; this helps to move the culture in the direction of transparency and psychological safety, both important traits in a healthy work environment; it's also a valuable way to gain insights into other people's ideas and perspectives.

Change begins with each of us but doesn't end with us.

SYSTEMIC PRESSURES

We know that our global economic system is designed to optimize for growth, not well-being, which exerts heavy pressures on leaders, managers, and, ultimately, entire organizations to operate under suboptimal parameters in a never-ending effort to keep up with a maxim of unlimited growth.

These pressures create environments that favor the short term over the long one, even when there's common agreement on what businesses, institutions, and governments need to do to solve our greatest challenges.

And while uprooting the current system doesn't seem like a realistic or viable option for any company or government worldwide, there's real value -and much research- in the positive business results of best business practices.

These range from better salaries to giving employees the autonomy and flexibility to work based on results and not necessarily "visibility," what Cal Newport calls pseudo-productivity, etc.

However, the companies that thrive because of their best practices and not despite them suggest that any business committed to creating an organization that truly prioritizes its people must place culture at the center of every decision made across the entire organization.

In other words, if we agree that 99% of business is done by people doing people things in a work setting, it makes sense then to guarantee that the setting is conducive to the best possible work we humans are capable of.        

We have barely scratched the surface of what this all means and how we as humans and leaders can better approach it; that is to say, this is the starting line.

As academic and author James P. Carse beautifully alluded to in his wonderful book Finite and Infinite Games, this is only the beginning of yet another infinite game: business.

Until Next time.