Is your team culture blocking or boosting your progress?

According to Jim Clemmer "Research consistently shows that 70% of efforts to improve customer service, quality, safety, productivity, innovation, employee engagement, restructure, or introduce new technologies fail. Leadership and organization culture are THE critical X factors. "Soft" leadership and culture boosts or BLOCKS strategy, structure, and change initiatives."

So where do you fit in that spectrum? Is the "how we do things here" culture in your business healthy? How do you know?

You can't measure your culture by the results that are achieved.

High performing teams don't necessarily have a culture that produces a happy workplace.

Experience of PCE members has been in boiler room cultures, sales at all costs and unsustainable work practices and environments : work hard play hard the doctrine that may deliver numerical success but at what cost?

Auditing your team culture can be confronting. Resistance to behavioural change or even simply questioning behaviour can be difficult to start but if the focus for longevity and sustaining peak performance and simultaneously delivering quality consistent WOW customers experiences, financial rewards and success and a happy, engaged, motivated workplace : then a culture audit and culture change is a necessity.

The steps involved:

1) analyse how the team communicates : is it effective, is everyone on the same page, included,

2) what expectations are set for team members : written and unspoken : what behaviours are valued and rewarded

3) what political structures have evolved in the team : where is the power base

4) what practices and processes are the most successful in the team for delivering results : if you documented that process would you be proud of it

5) are the behaviours exhibited in the team ones you want to replicate, model, change

6) do team members have balance in all areas of their lives : are they living their lives or paying a price

7) is team think dominated by a few players : do we have a process that delivers parallel thinking after considering all the issues at hand

This can be a confronting and rewarding process. It requires team members to be led by high EQ leaders.

Developing EQ is possible but requires committment and a desire to assess and progress.