High Performance Culture Requires Consistent Fuel

I’ve talked about how feedback — like maintaining a car — isn’t effective if only delivered on a quarterly or annual basis. The same wisdom can be applied to the development of a high performing organizational culture.

Like the performance automobile that isn’t tended to on a regular basis, or the performance athlete who doesn’t fuel his body properly with adequate nutrition or sleep, teams can’t perform at their best when corporate training and professional development is an “event.”

Too often, organizations think of culture efforts and teambuilding in terms of a monthly meeting or an annual retreat. Imagine if you only watered your plants on a quarterly basis? They’d shrivel up long before a month had passed.

Same goes for your team. It can’t thrive when corporate development or culture is simply viewed as programming, a day or a session.

Corporate culture is made daily. Not monthly. Not quarterly. And sure as heck not annually.

If you’re a couch potato six days of the week and are expected to perform at a fitness boot camp on the seventh day, you might pass out.

Really.

Your body isn’t cut out for the demands placed on it during an intense exercise session as it hasn’t been conditioned properly. Using that logic, why is it that we expect our culture to only get a “work out” every once in awhile or during a certain time of the year when a conference, retreat or session is hosted?

Culture is lived. It is the organic norm of the personality of your organization, and each individual that composes it. Your org’s “norm” will be set by what your leadership establishes, communicates, reinforces, and recognizes. Day in and day out.

Your vision and aspirations may be brilliant.

And noble.

And entirely attainable.

But the journey will be much more difficult if you’re not intentional in communicating that vision.

And aligning it with your corporate values.

And defining the behaviors that espouse the pursuit.

And cultivating a team who live and breathe these attributes with passion.

To develop and, beyond that, to sustain an unwavering culture of high-achievers we must fuel our team day in and day out, just as the performance athlete diligently fuels his body or the racer assures his performance automobile is tuned and serviced on a consistent basis.

Without such diligence, our efforts to develop an effective culture will be fruitless.