Stop making culture so complicated

Building a high performance culture is actually pretty simple. Fundamentally, there are only four things you need to do.

First, you must hire the right people. Then, engage them. At the same time, develop them. Finally, retain them.

If you do the first three well, the fourth will take care of itself.

Given that it’s as simple as this, why don’t more companies have a true high performance culture that drives their success?

For some reason, when we switch into “work mode”, we have a tendency to make things far too complicated. While the core of your work may be highly complex, building a healthy company around your innovations is mostly about common sense and relationships. Complexity and formality just get in the way. 

I still find it odd when I work with companies addicted to corporate speak, and I’m not sure when we all decided to become entirely different people at work than we are the rest of the time. But the belief that we should have a “professional” version of ourselves, whether born from anxiety, ambition, ego or a desire to fit in, has created some very unusual opinions about how culture should be formed.

Instead of keeping it simple and focusing on hiring the right people, engaging them and developing them, we’ve built a $40bn HR Tech industry - not counting all of the consultants - that’s hell-bent on overcomplicating culture. It’s like Financial Services, where vast fortunes are made obscuring simple truths like compound interest and diversification - we’ve invented a raft of engagement scores, development velocity matrices, trust indexes, intricate performance management frameworks and forced grading. 

Don’t get me wrong: metrics are useful. I like metrics. But by surrounding ourselves with all of these measures, scores and processes, we’re missing the essence of high performance culture. The only fundamental questions you need to answer are:

Is your company’s mission absolutely clear?

Do you know, specifically, the kind of environment and organisation you’re trying to build?

Are you hiring people who align with your desired culture?

Are your leaders behaving in alignment with it?

Are your team members performing well? If not, why not?

Are they developing and growing, personally and professionally?

Is there anything happening in your company that’s causing people to want to leave? Is it in your control to change it? Given your current resources, constraints, mission and values, do you want to?

Everything else is really just window dressing in service of these questions. Answer them, and you’ll have a clear indication of where to focus.

If you want a little help, come take our free High Performance Culture Scorecard. It takes three minutes and will give you absolute clarity.

(P.S. If you know someone who needs to read this today, send it to them and encourage them to subscribe to the Versapiens blog. If you haven’t subscribed yet, come join us on our journey through the intersection between culture, technology and business.)