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Performance Cultures

The delivery component of governance

The role of the Performance Culture

Organizations have two cultures.

One is the social culture. It’s the answer to the question “What’s it like to work there?”

They also have a performance culture. This is the answer to the question “What makes you successful?”

Performance Culture and Governance

There are two primary sources that shape an organization’s performance culture. The first source is what the top leaders say. And, the second one is what they do.

What they say often consists of the governance documents like the corporate vision, the mission statement, and the core values. In theory, everyone in the organization reads these, understands them, and effectively integrates them into their jobs.

Sometimes that works. More often it does not.

It’s far easier for people to simply watch what the top leaders do. Do they live these values? Do they show respect? Honesty? Diversity? Or whatever the published core values might be?

And when these top leader have to make a choice between instant gratification versus living the values, which do they choose? In other words – what values really matter?

When executives say one thing, but do another … people will believe what they see.

Intentional consistency matters

To end up with the culture you want, it’s best to start by defining your goals.

And that’s what the governing board or executive leadership team does when they craft their vision, mission, and core values. These are goals.

How to achieve these goals? Well, that’s why they create the governance rules, practices, and processes that they believe will achieve those goals.

Now comes the important step.

Their behaviors need to actually conform to those governance activities.

This is where the performance culture is formed. Everyone else in the organization may not have the experience to effectively translate the formal rules, practices, and processes into day-to-day decisions. But they can see how ‘the boss’ acts. And, odds are, they’ll emulate it. That’s the performance culture.

If everyone acts in a way that’s consistent with the values, you’ll get a performance culture that embraces those values. Without that consistency, the culture will be about doing whatever’s easiest or most expedient. And that’s no way to build a high-performing team.

TRM is the model for building a consistent performance culture

When top leaders can make it easy for everyone to consistently do the right things in the right way, that’s the path most peope will naturally take.

And when this path is exactly the same at every level of the organization, everyone will have the same mindset. They’ll all have the same understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong. They’ll have a consistent vocabulary about how to approach their work. They will be able to set expectations for each other, and hold each other accountable, because the rules are the same for everyone.

And that’s where TRM comes in. It’s a simple approach. There are only a few key steps that everyone, from top to bottom, can easily understand and adapt to their particular situation.

With TRM, it’s easy to build a consistent performance culture because it emphasizes the importance of a repetitive foundation of accountability and engagement. It’s not about bold new management techniques. Rather, it’s about eliminating the complexity and inconsistency that gets in the way. And building a culture around what’s simple and right. And produces results.

If you want people to do the right things in the right way, give them a simple model that shows them how.

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