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What is a high-performance cultural operating system?

In keeping with the theme of August being Women’s Month, last week The Human Edge hosted the latest in their executive breakfast presentation series. This particular breakfast was entitled: ‘How successful business women have used Crucial Conversations’. One of the topics which was discussed was the features of high-performance cultures.

Helene Vermaak, clinical psychologist and co-founder of The Human Edge, started off the morning by saying that there are just two measures that will indicate if you and your team, or you and your organisation, are successful:

1.    Do we have the ability to innovate consistently? Not only on those big innovation projects but on a daily basis. Are we always thinking about new ways of doing and being?

2.    Do we have the ability to execute consistently? Because that creates high performance.

“What we find in most organisations,” said Helene, “is that a lot of us tend to focus on the above-the-water-line elements: strategy, project plans, getting the right people in the right positions, processes and systems. We believe that these will deliver the results that we are after.”

 However, she said that we need to pay attention to the components below the surface in our organisation as this is where resistance comes from:

1.    Cultures of resistance: If a culture such as this is present in your organisation, your employees will approach anything new with the attitude of: “No, this is not going to work.”

2.    Cultures of silence: Many companies have ‘meeting silences’ and ‘corridor violence’. What this means is that people are silent in meetings, when they are supposed to be having crucial conversations about pertinent issues. However, when they get out of the meeting, they say all the things that they should have said in the meeting.

3.    Cultures of collusion: People in organisations are not able to hold others accountable. The question then becomes: “How do we hold our people accountable so that we can establish cultures of collusion in our organisation?”

4.    Cultures of cynicism: Are your leaders able to influence behaviour change in your team/ business? And do you have a specific framework which you use to look at the change in your team?

Author: Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company.