The eight culture challenges

It’s easy to think of your company’s culture as an ambiguous, unique entity. 

But the truth is, after years spent studying High Performance Culture and working with a broad range of businesses to develop it, there are common patterns that occur over and again. Understanding these patterns makes finding your solution much simpler - just find another group that’s solved this species of problem, and learn how they did it.

In fact, there are eight common culture challenges that leaders of all kinds of organisations face.

Challenge #1: Your team aren’t working as a high-performance unit. You’ve gone to great effort and expense to assemble a group of brilliant minds, with exactly the experience you need. Despite that, you’re struggling to really engage them in your mission, align them so that they can be effective and forge them into a consistently high-performing team. They don’t work effectively together, leading to mistakes, delays, missed milestone, awkward conversations with customers and investors and difficulty raising money. The result is a series of failed initiatives and products that never put your innovations in the hands of those that need them.

Challenge #2: Hiring and retaining great people is hard. You’re struggling to find, recruit and retain the right people, those who bring the specific skills you need while at the same time enhancing your culture and working well as a group. You’re wasting huge amounts of time, money and energy on hiring people who don’t deliver, don’t fit in and don’t work out. The reality is that the pool of available talent with the experience and skills you need is likely already small, and those that fit with your culture are an even more select group. Effectively finding them, attracting them and keeping hold of them is essential to your success.

Challenge #3: Keeping up with the pace of change. Every company goes through major transitions as they progress and grow. They might be positive transitions, like launching a new product, completing a funding round or becoming profitable, and they may be more challenging ones like restructuring, redundancies and failed programmes. The flavour will vary, but these transitions are a normal part of the journey. When they happen, it’s almost always the case that your objectives shift and the stakes are raised, so you need to evolve and do different things to deliver, but leaders often struggle with teams who are stuck in old ways of doing things that just don’t get them where they need to go.

Challenge #4: You’ve lost what made you special. The other effect of major transitions is that they usually require either growth or reduction in size, and progressing often means bringing in new people with very different skillsets, perspectives and backgrounds to those already in the organisation. As you’ve grown your business and expanded your team, you’ve tried to retain the DNA that got you to where you are, but without deliberate, considered action, your culture changes and you find yourself stuck running a company that you wouldn’t actually have chosen to be a part of.

Challenge #5: You can’t find the answers to your recurring problems. You’ve tried everything – changing your suppliers, bringing in new board members and advisors, getting that new piece of equipment that the R&D team are convinced holds the key to your breakthrough, updating your sales and marketing strategies – but the same problems keep cropping up and getting in your way. You can’t find a solution that sticks and these chronic issues are stopping you from getting the results you want.

Challenge #6: People aren’t developing, and they’re losing engagement. If your people aren’t moving forward, it won’t be long before they become stagnant, bored and disengaged. Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs, and one of the highest among them is the need for growth – it’s hardwired into us and we seek it out, especially if we’re ambitious. In a fast-paced, innovative company, things change all the time and if your people don’t get better at their jobs, take on new challenges and progress, they’ll either hold your company back or you’ll constantly have to bring in expensive new hires who may not be aligned to the environment you’ve created.

Challenge #7: There’s a leadership gap. Although the top executive team are capable leaders, those beneath them have been overpromoted (or prematurely promoted) and are lacking the capability to organise, inspire, manage and develop their teams. As a result, your most expensive employees are dragged into things below their level, further limiting the development opportunities for emerging leaders, and the cycle continues. Or you have the right strategy in place, and the resources to deliver it, but it doesn’t happen because your leaders can’t get their people to execute effectively. Both are extremely damaging to your chances of success.

Challenge #8: You’re doing “stuff” to drive the culture, but you have no idea if it’s working or why it’s not. There are lots of intangibles when it comes to people, teams and culture, but that’s not an excuse for randomly taking action hoping it will make a difference. While you may not be able to directly affect your ultimate outcome with a culture development initiative (although I’d argue that you often can), it’s crucial to have metrics and measures in place that show if something’s working, and if it’s not, why not.

Running like a thread through each of these challenges is the big, overarching difficulty that all companies and leaders encounter when it comes to culture – the concept itself. Culture is so broad, ill-defined and all-encompassing that it’s incredibly difficult to pin down and take specific action on. Culture touches strategy, operations, hiring, human resources, sales, marketing, product development, R&D, leadership – everything that your company does. Its influence is hard to overstate, but equally hard to grasp. 

It’s an elusive enemy, and most leaders, especially those from technology or business school backgrounds, aren’t experts in it. They don’t know where to start, they’re not really sure what to do about it, and it all feels like a huge effort and investment with no guarantee of results.

If you recognise these challenges, take heart from the fact that you’re not alone. If you want to know what to do next, and you’ve not yet signed up for one of our Decoding the Pattern events, doing so is your next step. Head over to Decoding the Pattern: The Secrets of High Performance now to book your place.

See you there…

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