Culture Flow Engineering : The only way of making your organisation REALLY profitable

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

As someone said : Culture is what happens after the manager leaves the room.

 In order for organisations to have the bandwidth to create sky touching strategies that work post the boardroom, they need their leaders to have their heads out of the box that constitutes their team and its nuances. Leaders that are constantly battling resource crunch, shortage of talent, unavailability of strategic thinkers and not to mention non collaborative teams that are scarred from fighting their own resource battles internally, are less likely to be open, enthusiastic and risk taking of the daunting new vision that has been set by the management, yet another quarter. Forget about looking outside the box, if the box is constantly needing supervision :)

Leaders know that culture eats their strategic plans and yet they don't have the time and the help, sometimes, to build it. Internally they know these numbers are achievable, they want to achieve it too and yet, episodes after episodes of lack lustre resources, dwindling performance and feeble motivation leaves them fighting alone at the top to make things work, all the while hoping their own positions are intact in the meanwhile.

More than before, it seems like it is the leaders that are driving the organisation while the organisation, like a large buffalo, just wants to be left alone to do their thing :) leaving the leader with no choice but to flag the buffalo into submission.

Top leadership recognises this fact and accolades are given to the leaders who manage their herd well enough to perform in rhythm to the leaders flute. This goes on and all is soon well with the world . World peace Amen!

Its quite likely that some leaders may be surprised at the above,  thanking god that this doesn't happen in our organisation and :) .....they would be so far from the truth.

You don't get staggering statistics like 75% people are disengaged from their work, without the above happening at some level and some degree in your organisation. What probably happens is that Leaders start to factor the inauthenticity of efforts and corresponding mediocre results as routine : the banal life being led, becomes the new normal.

So what is being proposed?

Take a deeeeeeeeeeeep dive look at your culture. To simplify, for now (even though it is not simple at all ), lets call Culture as :

" The way the work gets done, in your organisation" Of course, work get done in all organisations. That's how they meet their numbers. How it gets done is where the devil sits.

Before anything else, let me please rest the laurels on this:

Culture is NOT only a set of activities, policies, leaders that need to be in place and working well in unison. It is NOT just a set of values the org flaunts internally or externally. In fact, anything external is not culture. Those are the by products. Culture is what people experience when they are part of an organisation and how they act as result of that experience.

Great Nidhi! Experience? Really? What can one do about THAT? You can't really ensure that on a daily basis?

Yes. You can. To the extent that you are good at designing it because, hey...good news.. 

1. Culture can be engineered .

Just like you can be made to feel a certain way after seeing 'Avatar' or 'I am Malala'..... While one leaves you overwhelmed by the sheer use of technology, the other leaves you overwhelmed by the sheer might of humanity. For my hindi movie lovers, that is when 'Bhag Milkha Bhag' left you with pride for your country and inspired by the determination of the person to make things work despite adversity.

Culture, then, is a continuous flow of experience that ensures that people who come into the organisation, no matter where they come from, (like in a movie hall), end up feeling a certain way, and produce results from that threshold. For some companies, that threshold could be as high excellence every time, others collaboration or innovation and others just meeting work deadlines.

Similar to any good experience, building it requires painful attention to detail and engineering every bit of it at the back end to precision. The precision is so complete that it becomes ubiquitous to the watcher.

As an example, the CORE: Culture of realising excellence is a 4 dimensional framework that ensures holistic approach to the experience. Each dimension then addresses 4 key facets. The facets open into 12 interventions or expectations from the culture. These then roll into benefits for the people, organisation and business.

Working on it is like working on the colours in the sunrise. Each bit is different and yet work well every morning they come together.

The way to engineer one for your organisation is to understand the experience you want to provide. What is the one thing that holds priority in the hearts of the top leaders, the one thing they will uphold and exemplify, naturally. Reverse engineer that into all the areas of your organisation: including people and systems. Drill down to the lowest levels.

Also, while you could hire culture consultants to assess your culture and primarily tell you what it lacks, which is good. However, very few of them could probably tell you how to fill that gap within your organisation. Just like a doctor. While he can help you with curing the disease, after the symptoms flare, very few will be able to tell you all the lifestyle changes you need to make to ensure things never fall astray or that they don't revert back to the way they were.

2. Culture needs to flow.

For the technically competent, the above makes complete sense and doable. That's easy peasy. Create a framework, write down a few things inside it. Check list them with what you are currently doing or add a few more things , as flavour of the year, and presto! we are done with culture! Here comes the promotion...da dada da

Aha! that's where the catch is :). Culture is Flow engineering. You need to ensure that while there is a rigid structure to it, there is also spontaneity and sporadic-ness. Much like a dam, that contains and directs the river without changing the nature of the water and how it wants to flow. In fact, there should be an element of watching for surprises and encouragement of some rebellion built in, knowing the dam can contain it. With calm and quiet, systems and processes can be built and optimisation can happen. With rigor and rush, the old stale systems can be pushed out, creativity and innovation can be built in and flexibility is embedded.

Making the organisation profitable.

Sure, your organisation is profitable currently. Could you honestly say though, that your profits will withstand : the talent crunch, the poaching of resources, attrition, lack of motivation, weak leadership pipeline, demotivated employees, less that stellar performance from people, most of the year? Could you honestly say that you can afford your top leaders spending important mindshare on managing employees instead of making it to the finish line or setting the bar high for the business?

Culture is ensuring that people want to stay and make the business successful, that organisations nurture and promote leadership and excellence, that business is a by product of a naturally flowing talent pool performing to its best and that the customer loves to work with your team. Stellar profit is a buy product of a good relationship where compassion, excellence, alignment of goals and innovation is built in its culture.

In Conclusion

Culture is definitely not an easy mammoth to tame or ride. Those who  do, will tell you, it so definitely makes picking up that large load, year after year , much much easier than those who are still relying on levers.

Someone after one of our Personal excellence sessions said : " I now want to send my child and his child after that, to this company". Experience matters! It sets the trampoline for much larger jumps later.

Wishing you are able to influence such a system in your organisation. All the best.

Much love and dollops of energy your way,

Nidhi

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