High-Performance Culture

Companies want a culture that drives business performance. All too often, it’s their culture that prevents them from getting the performance they need. Creating a culture that leads to improved operating results is challenging. This transformation often occurs as part of a major business change – from mergers and acquisitions, to new brand launches, to leadership transitions to total overhauls of business models.

Whatever the situation, it all requires your people to behave differently to achieve different results. At Gagen MacDonald, we work with you during change to leverage your organization’s brand, culture, vision and history to motivate and align employees behind accomplishing business objectives. This means making the vision more relevant to those that need to execute against it.

Our Observations about a High-Performance Culture

It’s not a question of “if” we change. A common misconception is that employees don’t want to change. People resist if forced to change, but on the right terms, they will embrace it. Take the opportunity to rally the troops and inspire action.

Change doesn’t happen only at the top. It can’t stop there. You need to tap into your front-line employees—the people closest to your product and your customer—to drive change. Change is often driven from the bottom up, not the top down.

Create a clear picture. Success comes when the desire to change is connected to a clearly defined outcome—and there’s a pathway to get there. Bring it down to what employees do every day, and have a milepost to measure whether what they’re doing is really working.

Highlight the desired behaviors. Often this includes taking risks, honest assessment of successes and failures, aggressive collection of ideas and information from others, careful listening, and openness to new ideas.

Leverage communications. Without communication, how can employees know what to do? Leaders must make communication part of the organizational DNA. They must seize every opportunity to connect with people throughout the organization to provide a common purpose to employees at all times – and especially in times of change.

The results speak for themselves:

Gained support from employees to turn around an $8 billion manufacturing company and achieve a six-fold increase in market capitalization.
Helped employees embrace a new strategy and implement operation changes to exceed operations goals.