5 Ways To Influence Corporate Culture Toward Higher Performance

Do Your Leaders Properly Influence Corporate Culture?
Not all leaders know how to properly influence corporate culture for higher performance.  Not a company on this earth would opt for anything less than excellent performance from their employees if it were merely a choice that they could make. And, yet isn’t your corporate culture (how work gets done) a leadership choice?

High Performance Culture
Our organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, and employee engagement.  Striving for a high performing culture is something that all leaders should try to do – especially if they want to outperform their peers..

Five Proven Ways To Influence Corporate Culture Toward Higher Performance
Here are five ways you, as a leader, can influence corporate culture toward ever higher performance:

1. Establish a Performance Management System that Works
   You will know performance management is working when employees believe that the performance evaluation process is relevant, meaningful, fair, appropriate, useful, accurate, and transparent.

   From our perspective it all starts with ensuring that everyone understands how their job success and failure is measured in terms of both results and behaviors in a way that aligns with the overall corporate strategy.

2. Empower Your Employees to Make Decisions and Continuously Improve
   You will know you are on the right track when employees feel empowered to make decisions that impact their work, are encouraged to find new ways of solving problems, and have the freedom to improve important products, processes, and services.
3. Ensure Your Customers and Their Best Interests Are Truly the Focus of All Business Activity
   That means putting customers first by ensuring that your customers feel confident about the quality of your products and services, customer satisfaction is a company-wide priority, and that you are organized in a way to effectively help your customers to succeed.
4. Provide Relevant Development Opportunities at All Levels
   Learning an development is especially important at the management level because managers often set the tone. Give people a chance to learn and grow in a way that plays to their strengths and helps them to achieve their career goals.
5. Encourage Open and Effective Communication
   To be effective, communication must easily and accurately flow up, down, and sideways. That means ensuring company leadership has communicated a vision of the future that motivates each and every employee while keeping everyone well informed about issues going on within the company.

   It also means placing an emphasis on making collaboration between teams, functions, and departments a priority.

The Bottom Line
How you manage performance is at the heart of creating a high performance culture.  To influence your culture, align your performance management process, encourage collaboration, share information, empower decision making, and put your customers first.  This powerful combination will lift performance to the next level.

To learn more about how to influence corporate culture toward higher performance, download The 3 Levels of Corporate Culture to Get Right to Execute Your Strategy

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.