High Performance Culture - How to Build It at Work

A High Performance Culture Matters

“Thank you for a unique and great approach to building a high performance culture. The facilitator was brilliant. It will help us to create even higher performance now that we all know what matters most.

It really opened our eyes about a different way to lead.”
Simon Jefferson | Managing Director | AKQA

“The high performance culture approach combined with the strategy and executive coaching work helped us to grow revenue by 48%, increase profits by 10%, and close more than 50% of our deals over the last 12 months.

Aligning our strategy, culture, and talent is making all the difference. Thank you LSA!”
Laurie Sewell | President & CEO | Servicon Systems

Given your unique strategy and circumstances, how can you get the most out of your organization and team in a way that makes sense for your business and for your people?

Many still mistake workplace culture as soft or abstract. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our organizational alignment research found that workplace culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing teams in terms of:

Revenue growth and profitability
Leadership effectiveness and employee engagement
Customer satisfaction and loyalty

We define workplace culture as how and why things truly get done in an organization.

The good news is that culture can be measured and shaped by understanding the way people think, behave, and work. The bad news is that if your culture is unhealthy or misaligned with your people or business strategies, you will not perform at your peak.

Experienced leaders know that their strategy must go through culture to be successfully implemented.

Workplace culture exists by design or by default. Regardless of origin, strong cultures can help leaders perform, or strong cultures can hurt performance.

With so many options for leaders who want to improve the performance of their teams, it is not surprising that so many get lost in and frustrated by impractical theories and expensive consultants trying to make sense of it all.

Our clients tell us that our research-backed, practical, and action-oriented approach to assessing and aligning organizational culture provides clarity, structure, and measurable results for leaders who want to significantly lift performance.

Typically, leaders turn to a High Performance Culture solution when circumstances have changed, and they want to:

Ensure that their culture is healthy enough to raise, clarify, and align performance expectations
Remove cultural barriers that are hindering strategy execution
Design a workplace culture that aligns with their business and talent strategies
Identify how leaders can reach aggressive targets without creating resentment or disengagement
Increase accountability for performance improvement
Motivate their teams to perform at their peak

Once your business strategy is clear enough to act, our approach typically involves four main steps customized to each unique situation:

1. Assess Your Current Culture
Assessing your current culture allows leaders to accurately pinpoint strengths to leverage and weaknesses to address regarding how and why work currently gets done. Typical outcomes include identifying:

Levels of organizational health
Strengths and weaknesses of the current culture
Areas of cultural alignment and misalignment vis-à-vis your business strategy
Likely accelerators and inhibitors to performance
Benchmark comparisons

2. Identify the Key Cultural Actions to Improve Performance
Review the assessment results and agree on the critical few cultural actions required to create a healthy, high performing, and aligned workplace culture.

3. Execute the Key Cultural Actions
Implement the top cultural shifts in a way that makes sense for your strategy and unique circumstances.

4. Measure Improvement and Agree Upon Next Steps
Monitor progress and continuously improve.

If you would like to learn how building a high performance culture at work has helped leading organizations perform at their peak, please contact us.

Related Information

Originally, we launched a RFP to partner with a sales training provider to improve the sales skills of our global distributor network.

LSA Global challenged our thinking by suggesting we focus on the systemic strategy, culture, and talent factors that create sales success before we invested in the more symptomatic needs of sales skills and knowledge.

LSA Global identified the critical strategic actions to improve overall sales performance and then designed and delivered world class business sales training across the globe to help increase revenue and margin.

I’m so happy we took a more strategic approach to sales performance with LSA. Thank you for making this fit our culture.

Kim Benson
Director Human Resources

The experiential New Employee Orientation was an incredible success for 2,500+ new hires over 4 years spread across the globe.

LSA partnered with us to create an innovative solution on very short notice and added a huge amount of value.

We could never have done it without their unmatched combination of expertise, professionalism, and creativity that aligned everything with our unique culture and growth strategy.

Even our executives and experienced hires were blown away!

Brenda Wagner
Founder and President

We greatly value our relationship with LSA Global.

They focused on understanding our unique culture and helping us to move our strategic priorities forward.

LSA continues to deliver top quality consulting and leadership development solutions that are highly customized for our unique situation.

I highly recommend LSA Global to anyone looking to greatly improve their leadership, management, and project capabilities.

Bonnie S. Olson
Vice President of Human Resources

We highly value the relationship we have with LSA Global.

I highly recommend LSA to anyone who is looking to strategically, practically, and fundamentally improve individual and organizational effectiveness in a way that makes sense for their unique culture and strategy.

Laura Dominguez
Director of Human Resources

Thanks a million for the great strategy and cultural alignment session for our global leadership team.

Your experience and patience to expertly deal with the inherent and complex challenges between business units uncovered many hidden truths that created a great roadmap for us to move forward as a unified leadership team.

I recommend LSA to any leader looking to shape and align organizational culture.

Juan Plaza
Geospatial Sales Manager, Latin America

At the onset of our engagement with LSA, I was skeptical that an outside firm would be able to understand and dissect our organization’s highly complex and technical business challenges.

However, through the interview and strategy retreat processes that LSA utilized, they provided a fresh, innovative, and practical perspective that created tremendous strategic value and focus for our executive leadership team.

As a result, I would highly recommend LSA Global to any leader struggling with building the strategic alignment and high performance teams necessary to generate sales growth, in a way that fits their unique corporate culture.

Robert Laudati
Managing Director

I can’t emphasize enough what a huge shift you helped to create for us as an organization. Thanks again for your change management consulting help and guidance.

The clarity, practicality, focus, and accountability are exactly what we needed to make this strategy and major transformation a success from a hearts and minds perspective.

Cris Alvarez
VP Corporate Strategy

Great job in designing the Mergers and Acquisition strategy session for our global leadership team. The session was excellent.

I gained additional insight on the importance of the role of HR regarding strategy, culture, and people in Mergers and Acquisitions and would recommend LSA to anyone looking to align strategies and cultures.

Gloria Veon
Senior Vice President, Human Resources

LSA helped us design and deliver blended leadership solutions for our key leaders to help drive our growth plans in a way that aligned with our unique culture and values.

LSA understood our business, had deep expertise in the content areas, customized the leadership development programs to fit our specific needs, and delivered great results in alignment with our strategic priorities, culture, and performance management systems.

I highly recommend them to anyone looking to take their leaders and the performance of their teams to the next level.

Beth A. Taylor
Vice President of Human Resources

You have become our premier change leadership strategic partner. Your expertise in the human side of change is unparalleled and enabled our company to successfully implement our ERP Solution under challenging and ever-changing circumstances.

Thank you for your practical and outcome-oriented approach.

Ted Ramlet
CIO & SVP

It was a challenge to find a consultant with an approach to performance improvement that fit our unique performance culture and style. We were pleasantly surprised to discover LSA’s depth of expertise in the fields of motivation, developmental coaching, performance management, and measurement.

LSA seamlessly integrated those components without our folks feeling like the intervention was forced. They understood what we were trying to accomplish, helped us clarify our objectives, and created a solid, refreshing approach that quickly got us moving and engaged at all levels across the organization.

Overall, I couldn’t be happier that we found a true strategy and implementation partner in LSA.

Doug Hansen
President and Director

The LSA customized Organizational Alignment Survey gave us a comprehensive view of how our employees experience our culture, talent, and strategy.

The systemic approach provided us with a great forum to discuss the strengths and opportunities in our organization, and then to quickly get focused on the key actions critical to executing our business and people strategies.

Mark Forrest
General Manager, FSM Division

We looked to LSA Global as a consulting partner to help us explore innovative and scholarly approaches to promote employee engagement and sustain the unique culture we’ve built over the last decade. LSA helped us perpetuate coaching as a discipline across the organization by integrating our core values, goal setting, and performance management.

We appreciate LSA’s commitment to cutting-edge practices to help keep us a step ahead during this time of rapid change.

Rosalyn Chan
Vice President, Human Resources

LSA helped change our entire culture around meetings, making them more effective and efficient, thus enabling us to concentrate on driving more business.

Thank you!

Terry Wassman
VP of Human Resources

LSA Global really shifted our perspective about strategic clarity and organizational culture.

The 3 C’s approach to workplace culture is very practical and really helps executive teams – even skeptical ones – ensure that your culture is healthy, high performing, and aligned.

Amy Cappellanti-Wolf
Chief Human Resources Officer