Which Culture Changes Create Winning Organizations?

Padres Manager Andy Green via Fox Sports

The San Diego Padres Major League Baseball team has a long history of losing seasons. The team hired a new manager, Andy Green. It didn’t take him long to make a pivotal observation: the Padres have been consistent losers not because of their personnel deficits but because they have never developed a winning culture.

Green is well aware of other losing teams that had adequate-enough (but not necessarily stellar) talent were able to transform into winners through the magic of culture change… without having to make major personnel changes. Here’s how he put it: “That’s the bottom line, changing the culture to change this into a winning organization.”

As a Culture Architect, I wholeheartedly agree with Manager Andy Green. What remains to be seen is whether he has the skills to translate his wise intentions into practical procedures that produce profitable results.

Creating successful culture upgrades includes two obvious ingredients:

1. Active participation and co-creation in the culture change process by the majority of the executives and implementors
2. The leaders having the needed backbone to part with those who don’t ultimately get on board, no matter how talented those individuals might be.

The ingredients that are far less obvious have to do with what to get buy-in around. Those are the secret ingredients that convert your enterprise’s good intentions (its vision, mission, values and goals) into aligned successful daily actions by your personnel and work teams.

This leads to an obvious question: “What culture upgrading procedures are the most useful ones to install?” In truth, very few owners, leaders, and executives know the answer… let alone the best versions of these procedures to install and how to ensure that they’re used by everyone on a daily basis. These things are the secret sauce that makes magic happen; where the rubber meets the road!

Ready for that secret sauce?

Culture Architecture that successfully converts good intentions into aligned consistent actions relies on synergy among three key practical ingredients:

1. Guiding Principles for Decision-Making
2. Maximizing Individual Engagement
3. Collaborative Accountability Procedures

Guiding Principles provide a frame of reference that everyone in an organization uses, both individually and collectively, to evaluate the benefits of a particular opportunity and to successfully convert unplanned challenges into unexpected blessings. Do you know how to facilitate the development of Guiding Principles for Decision-Making and ensure that they’re consistently used by everyone in your enterprise?

Individual Engagement is optimized through assisting each individual in aligning their personal life mission with their role’s true value to their workgroup in specific and the organization in general, and the organization’s true value to those it serves in specific and to society in general. Whenever this alignment exists, engagement can’t help but be propelled to all-time highs. Do you know how to facilitate Integrated Purpose Alignment in your personnel that supercharges high engagement?

Collaborative Accountability is a set of four exquisitely integrated procedures that 1) establish accountability-capable agreements; 2) upgrade best practices; 3) use implementation breakdowns to create more effective and enjoyable collaboration; and 4) create truly useful and motivating performance reviews. This Collaborative Accountability package is your most powerful super-power for building the types of collaboration, trust, and group synergy that create sustainably successful enterprises. Do you know each the step-by-step details for each of these procedures and how to ensure that they are utilized by your managers, work groups, and personnel on a daily basis?

If you are an owner, leader, executive or manager, and you already know how to effectively install all three of these key Culture Architecture ingredients, good on you!! I mean it. You’re truly in rare company. My advice to you is to make an immediate priority of installing all of these ingredients, because the sooner you do this, the sooner you will see morale, loyalty, engagement, productivity and profitability skyrocket.

If you don’t know how to successfully facilitate the installation of all of these three core Culture Architecture ingredients, no harm, no shame, no fault, no blame: as vital as they are to success, there are shockingly few people you can learn them from, and even fewer who are adept at assisting you installing them in your enterprise!

I am one of those experts. If you’re like Padres Manager Andy Green in knowing that optimizing your Culture Architecture is one of the most important, valuable and urgent things you can do to supercharge your enterprise’s success, but you’re not sure how to pull it off, I invite you to schedule a free Master Plan Illumination™ consultation with me (not with a coach but with me directly!).

In a mere 25 minutes, you and I will collaborate to:

1. Upgrade your Big Picture Clarity about how to best get the results you seek
2. Identify your Highest-Leverage Next Step toward achieving those results (regardless of whether with me or through a better-matched resource)
3. Determine whether the consulting, training or mentoring I provide in that area is your most useful Next Step Resource at this time.

If this free consultation opportunity is right for you, I’ve made it incredibly easy for you to schedule your Master Plan Illumination™ consultation with me right now. The following link will take you directly into my online scheduler so you can immediately select a meeting time that works for both of us: www.DrGruder.com/illuminate

I look forward to serving you very soon!

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About Strategic Self-Development™

Marriage, parenting & entrepreneurship are the 3 most demanding AND rewarding self-development paths in existence. Dr. David Gruder is a 9-award-winning Entrepreneur Success Psychologist who helps:

1. You become you who need to be if you want to get maximum value from the other business development resources you need to succeed;
2. Your advisors, implementors & funders become the high-performance collaborators they need to be so they can dependably produce the results you need from them;
3. You craft Non-Manipulatively Irresistible™ messaging that helps the right advisors, implementors, promoters, customers, & funders say “yes” and the wrong ones say “no.”

If you want to master any of these vital entrepreneur success, Dr. invites you to schedule a free Master Plan Illumination™ 
>Consultation with him:  www.DrGruder.com/illuminate.

About David Gruder