6 Tips for Building a High-Performance Culture

You've probably heard the phrase, "You can't out-train a bad diet". The implication is that more than training is needed to achieve health goals. If you are serious about getting healthier, you will have to give up super-sized McDonald's meals.

Similarly, you can't achieve optimal team performance when the culture sucks. All teams have a culture, "the way we work around here". The question is, does your culture support and guide productive behaviour? Healthy cultures fulfil two overarching requirements. Firstly, they create an environment of psychological safety. People who work in these groups can trust how they will be treated, how information will be shared, how resources will be allocated and how problems will be solved.

With the first requirement of high-performance cultures met, people can focus on the second element. The second element guides people on how they should approach their work. Values like accountability and professionalism inform people of general expectations.

But, like getting healthier, building a better culture requires more than printing off a list of values and adding a meeting agenda item. We have all sat through the mandatory 'value share' and thought, "Here are 10 minutes of my life I'm never getting back". It's okay to make values visible and discuss them in meetings; it just isn't enough, and when that is all we do, it looks like tokenism. So how do you embed values and create a high-performance culture:

1. Get honest - face reality and acknowledge the behaviours currently happening that are not helpful or productive. If you are in a leadership role, then take responsibility. Those behaviours are happening because you are allowing them to. Sorry, but it's true.
2. Review or identify your values - most groups we work with need help remembering their values (that includes management), which indicates that they are probably there as a marketing gimmick. Involve the team and select up to five values that align with your purpose. People must connect with the values and see how they support the team in achieving its goals. Relevance is everything.
3. Make them your own - values are abstract concepts that can be hard to apply. However, organisations that successfully build high-performance cultures turn the values into something more tangible. For example, Atlassian expresses the value of integrity as, 'don't $@!% the customer'.
4. Make them visible - I know I made fun of values posters earlier but making the values visible is essential. However, consider being more creative than posters. For example, the giant lego Woody in the foyer of Pixar is a physical reminder to employees that 'quality is the best business plan'.  
5. Be a great role model - leaders must exemplify the values in action. When you establish values, many employees will 'sit on the fence' and wait to see what others do, especially those in leadership roles. Role-modelling the values requires vulnerability because we won't always get it right - that makes you human. The critical thing is to acknowledge the mistake and make amends. 
6. Coach values in business-as-usual moments - people need help understanding how the values apply on the job. We don't need to have all the answers. Still, we must remember to consider the relevant value(s) in a particular situation. By explicitly referring to values, we build our collective databank of what the values look like in practical terms. For example, we might ask, "If we use the value of integrity to make this decision, what decision does it guide us to make?"

Having talked about values, it won't surprise you that there is zero relationship between an organisation's proclaimed values and company results. So why bother investing effort into embedding values? Because when we take values off the poster and make them tangible in business-as-usual moments, they make a real difference to organisational performance. High-performance cultures are the product of leaders who apply deliberate effort to creating work environments that give people something to belong to and enable them to perform to their potential.