Purpose, Clarity, Accountability and Empathy in Uncertain Times

Ensure a Winning Culture in Your Organisation

Leading HR expert James George defines the culture of an organisation as a ‘system’ of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which governs how people behave in that organisation.

If an organisation has a friendly culture, the team there is likely to be closer than an organisation with a toxic culture. However, there is more to an organisation’s culture than having a friendly, happy team, though that helps. An organisation’s culture needs to nurture and support results and business performance. What it needs is a ‘Winning Culture’ that sets the stage for high expectations, a positive attitude, and successful performance. A winning culture focuses on objectives, motivates achievement, values accountability, concentrates on results and celebrates wins.

Different experts have varied suggestions on what helps an organisation create a winning culture. Additionally, we need to look at the impact of today’s uncertain and isolating workplace scenarios.

As per HR professors and experts J.T. Delaney (University of IOWA) and M.A. Huselid (Rutgers University) employee participation and empowerment, job redesign including team-based systems, extensive employee training and performance-contingent incentive compensation, are crucial.

Cornell University’s Rosemary Batt, on the other hand, says that involvement is critical and high involvement work systems generally include high skill requirements. Work designed so that employees have discretion and opportunity to use their skills in collaboration with other workers; and an incentive structure that enhances motivation and commitment.

Meanwhile, David Guest, a professor in organisational psychology and HRM at King’s College London, has a different take altogether. He says `Employees perform because they want to, or at least feel obliged to, rather than in response to financial incentives or bureaucratic requirements’.

Participation, empowerment, training, incentives, are words that come up, again and again. But how do you incorporate them into your organisation’s culture? Below are four main winning guidelines that will help you plan and evaluate the culture of your organisation. During these unprecedented times, take extra care to ensure intentionality and inclusion. These guidelines are useful for a start-up or an existing company looking to make a change in their way of working towards achieving results.

A Culture of Purpose

A Purpose is a motivational force that binds a team together, guiding and delivering towards a common goal -- the raison d’etre for existing. Motivational speaker Simon Sinek calls it the ‘Why’ of the organisation. This ‘why’ goes deep into the organisation and is the purpose that people come to work each day. A winning team has a Purpose that symbolises its values and beliefs while charting out a path to achieving it. 

Some examples of a clear purpose are:

Uber’s mission statement: “Transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone.”

“Why build Airbnb? Because travelling could and should be so much more intimate than staying at hotels.”

Spotify’s chairman Daniel EK said their goal was “To inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to live off their art and a billion people to enjoy it and to be inspired by it.”

Zolando’s aim is “To reimagine fashion by creating, assembling, improving and rethinking so that all can benefit.”

The ‘Why’ of the organisations hasn’t changed during the pandemic. The mission helps build a larger purpose in the team with clear deliverables. 

A Culture of Clarity

In his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari says: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”

For a team to be successful, their priorities and expectations have to be crystal clear and transparent. Everyone in the organisation must be clear about his role, his goals, the financial targets he is chasing, and the relationship between what he does and the achievement of the goals. In the same vein, one should know about the roles and targets of other members of the team as well. This knowledge helps team members clearly understand the larger picture and the dependencies existing between team members. The team should also be well aware of the benefits they are likely to reap on the achievement of goals. Clarity is especially important for millennials.

Here is where targets and incentives come in. If a team is clear about what they have to do and how they can be successful, the culture of the team will have more trust, collaboration, and confidence. Clarity has become crucial today. Working from home and meeting each other primarily on Zoom is a problematic situation. Leaders must reaffirm goals, targets, matrix responsibilities and incentives so that each member of the organisation knows his role and the role of others. 

A Culture of Accountability

A winning team is one that is competent and achieves its targets. It is important to remember that accountable individuals don’t always make accountable teams. The difference here is that what the team is setting out to do is more extensive than any one individual’s goals and can be achieved if the team works together to make it happen.

You need to set clear expectations from the team as a whole and share what success looks like with them. Deploy a system by which each one knows the objectives of the other members of the group. Create regular checks within the team so that they can assess whether they are on track or need to readjust to achieve. They have to own their success or failure, and the internal culture should allow them to hold each other accountable for the same. 

A Culture of Empathy

Everybody comes to work to do a job. But clearly, people who feel cared for stay at work and do better. A good team leader’s role is to understand, manage for and develop her team so that they can each perform to their full potential. When people care for each other, they pitch in to make each other successful. They focus on the overall team objectives and not just on their own. Empathy is contagious and required in good times and bad. To make empathy a part of your DNA focus on the behaviour of your teams. Apart from leadership, this often has to be built from the bottom up. Empathy or human-centredness has emerged as a critical tool that all leaders require. An empathetic team balances the ability to take care of each other during the pandemic and at the same time, take hard calls. The freedom to call each other out for errors made.

Different teams have different cultures. While some will be more innovative, others will be people-focused. Others will be aggressive or stable. Each of these has its strengths and is ideal for specific situations. It is important to remember this. Different stages of the lifecycle of your company will require you to make shifts you want to encourage. Of course, a winning culture is imperative at each.

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In conclusion, to keep winning or success at the centre of your team’s culture, you need to clearly define the ‘Why’ or ‘Purpose’ of the team. They must live and dream that purpose. Next, there needs to be complete clarity on what the specific objectives for the team are and what needs to done to get there. These objectives should be broken down into short-term key results so that it is easy to see whether one is on track. Once you have laid the road map out, you should hold the team accountable, and they should hold each other answerable to achieve success. Start and end with empathy. Make sure you have empathy champions at various levels, who keep a check on relationships and are influencers.

Remember, things don’t always turn out the way you want them to, so one often has to change tracks midway. The current rollercoaster we are all on is an excellent example of that. Identification of when and where changes are required is critical, and this will happen only when the team is responsible for their success. They will own their goal and will often come up with new ways to reach there — and this is the culture we aspire.