People

Core Values & Purpose:
Building Your Company’s Culture

We have all experienced bad culture and what it means to moral, to growth, to winning. If your culture sucks will you be able to retain A players? Culture eats strategy for breakfast and we all know why.

Culture is everything, it helps you achieve brilliance in all aspects of your peoples’ lives. It's your DNA, and it is made up of two core components: core Purpose, which answers the ‘WHY we exist’ question and core Values, the actual company rules that drive the behaviours and principles valued in fellow employees and the way you work.

In his book ‘Good to Great,’ Jim Collins studied the attributes of top performing companies. The top performing companies, those with proven sustained growth histories had both great cultures AND delivered consistently strong financial performance for shareholders.

Simon Sinek wrote “All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year……happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order”

The trick is how to clone it to the extent that they drive decision taking at every level.

Objective

Identify and communicate your company's culture, it's DNA.

Key Results

1. Set The Company's Core Values, the handful of cultural rules that you will not compromise on
2. Define the Company's Core Purpose, answer the 'why we exist' question
3. Brought alive through your weekly scrum meetings and the 10 Rockefeller Habits

NB This growth tool is readily available on the internet, and it’s not one of our Growth Tools but it’s rock solid and guaranteed to help you win, so why reinvent the wheel? Just remember this one takes a great deal of thinking.

Jim Collins Culture Framework

FACe

How are you measuring if someone is an A player? Does everyone know who is accountable for what? Is everyone clear about everyone else’s KPIs? How transparent is your organization? Are people crystal clear about what their job function is and how to measure continuous improvement?

Use this tool to identify the Right Seats to scale the business, and the right KPIs to drive kaizen (continuous improvement). Ensure the right people are in their key seats. With functional accountabilities clear it’s easy to produce high quality Personal Scorecards and OKRs.

“Less people, paid more with a lower total wage cost.”

Objective

Identify the right seats and have clear functional accountability.

Key Benefits & Results

1. Organisational Structure sanity check as to what the right seats are to grow your business
2. Clarity through debate of the metrics that matter per function
3. Building the loop of continuous improvement with leading KPIs as well as lagging KPIs per function
4. Foundations for setting the right OKR (Objective & Key Results) for the right Personal Scorecards

FACe Template

PACe

Are your processes highly efficient? Companies produce stuff, and processes are core to creating value. Do you have people accountable for continuously improving your processes? If so, are they empowered to debate and challenge Functional heads? 

Are your processes cross functional or hidden & controlled within silos? What happens when workflows cross functional boundaries? Why do ERP projects disrupt organizational harmony? Are you a process driven organization or a silo based organization?

Do you believe your employees do not want added responsibility? Are they better off being told what to do rather than empowered to achieve the results they are employed to? Process accountability with teeth is a must. Process owners need the support of a strong CEOs else they will fail at their first contact with the might of functional heads and their ivory towers!

Eyes ON. Hands OFF.

Denning wrote: “efforts to improve the process make the organisation more efficient whereas efforts to monitor the process makes the organsisation less effective. “us” keeping an eye on “you” equals controlling equals less engagement/ motivation/ productivity...... “

Use this tool to identify the core processes that drive your business' value chain. Assign the right KPIs to give insights. Assign an owner to drive kaizen (continuous improvement).  Take control out of the silos and ivory towers.

Watch the video below, Tom Wujec’s Making Toast approach breaks down barriers and creates transparent debates. A BS remover if ever there was one! I have seen ERP blueprints done in days vs months, and there’s no better way to kick off the PACe growth tool.

Objectives

Identify KPIs that make your key processes faster and smarter.

Key Benefits & Results

1. Organisational clarity on Process ownership
2. Complete understanding of the Process Perspective for the Balanced Scorecard
3. Foundations for setting the right OKR (Objective & Key Results) for the right Personal Scorecards

PACe Template

Personal Score Cards

Do you still have Job descriptions? How do they help you win? When did you last look at yours? The new reality has no time for fluffy relics of the Industrial Age. Job descriptions are vague, with little clarity on accountabilities and results and spend their time hidden away in the department of Human Remains! 

Today’s reality has no time for fluff. A well-developed Personal Scorecard not only acts as a business case for hire, it massively reduces costly miss-hires and provides a solid foundation for growing your people and the deployment of OKRs.

This tool is the result of more than 10 years’ continuous improvements, a mashup using best of breed tools from Top Grading, Multipliers and Gallup's 5 Strengths.

Start with WHY. Identify why the job exists. Ask how will this investment help you win? If it’s a key position ask “How does it accelerate and enable you to achieve your strategic plan? Then, assign it the right OKRs (objectives & key results) to ensure clarity, focus and accountability so that you are on-track to achieve right seats, right people, right things delivered right.

Objective

Increase and retain A-players whilst reducing costly miss-hires.

Key Benefits & Results

1. Reduce number of miss-hires, and the huge cost associated miss-hires.
2. Clearly defined accountabilities for every role
3. Increase % A-Players & Retain them
4. Fast, rapid, and precise performance appraisals
5. Mechanism to dovetail and align 90 day strategic OKRs to individuals' OKRs

Personal Scorecard

The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team

How healthy is your Senior Management Team (SMT)? How politicalized is your SMT?  How aligned is this team? Have they got each other’s support and backing? Are debates powerful or emotional? Does company come first or are priorities fashioned around personal gains?

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. If the Senior Management Team sucks, so will the rest of the company. Dysfunctional SMTs are accountable for more company failures than anything else.

Use this tool to benchmark the Senior Management Team's leadership health, to start the conversation. Any dysfunctions that may come up will not die easily, making a team functional and cohesive requires levels of courage and discipline that many groups cannot seem to muster. The team must work together and overcome any hot spots in measured steps.

To build a high performing senior management team we will follow a set methodology, set clear objectives and key results and cover progress over the 90-day strategic planning cycles.

Taken from Pat Lencioni's best-selling book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”.

Objective

Build a high performing Senior Management Team.

Key Benefits & Results

1. Open, transparent, fact based debates
2. Faster, better decision taking
3. Alignment around common objectives
4. Committed, Accountable Results driven culture
5. Less BS!

5 Dysfunctions Questionnaire