Introduction
Organizations, by their very nature, create value. This course is designed to provide senior-level culture champions, or Chief Culture Officers, with the tools they need to guide the development of high-impact organizational cultures of value generation. Organizational cultures either evolve or are designed. To maximize the creation of value, high-impact organizations design their culture. This course is designed to give each participant the tools to guide the journey to become a high-impact or elite-level organizational culture and performance.
High-Impact organizational cultures have two essential attributes:
- Create value for employees: High-impact organizational cultures create a transformative place for employees to work. This transformative experience is characterized by 1) high levels of employee engagement and 2) growing personal and professional growth.
- Extraordinary levels of customer value. This elite-level customer experience is usually characterized by 1) high customer satisfaction and 2) high customer retention levels.
Step One – The Systemic Nature of the Organization
The first step is understanding the systemic nature of the organization as well as the various subsystems.
Learning Objectives:
- The value-creating nature of a system.
- How system elements of an organizational system interact to create value.
- Structure of the organizational culture-generating system.
Step Two – Identifying the employee customer brand
Every system produces something of value. Average organizations produce average value, while high-impact organizations produce high-impact value for their employees and customers. The distinguishing factor between the two is clarity. High-impact organizations are unambiguously clear about the clarity of value they seek to deliver. This value becomes their brand. However, it is not a brand as defined by their communications department. It is their brand in the eyes of their customers and employees.
Learning Objectives:
- Identifying the essential value or brand customers are seeking.
- Identifying the essential value or brand employees are seeking.
- Debrief: how will you guide your organization to identify its essential customer value or brand?
Step Three – Core Values and Foundational Behaviors
High-Impact organizations are driven by core values or the principles by which they operate, drive critical decisions, interrelate, and establish the daily practices of leaders and managers. While most organizations have identified a set of core values, high-impact organizations take their values a step further. They define these values by the daily behaviors leaders and managers are expected to model.
Learning Objectives:
- Identifying essential core values.
- Aligning essential values with foundational behaviors.
- Developing the team charter
- Debrief: How will you work with your organization to develop values driven foundational behaviors?
Step Four – The Employee Experience (Brand)
In modern economies, employees are just as able to demand a transformative work experience as customers are to demand an experience that best fits their profile. In recent years, the power dynamic of employee and employer has shifted in favor of the employee.
There are many ways to describe the employee experience. However, high-impact organizations are unambiguously clear about the delivery of employees.
Learning Objectives:
- Aligning the employee value with customer value.
- Identifying specific characteristics of employee value.
- Debrief: how will you work with your organization’s senior leadership to identify and develop the employee experience or brand?
Step Five – Building the Value-Generating Role and Mindset
Everyone has roles they play, and we can easily slip between roles. Most people move between roles effortlessly. For example, women can move without thought between mothers, teachers, organizational executives, and local volunteers.
When leaders and managers understand how they create value for employees and customers, they can develop a value-generating mindset.
Learning Objectives:
- Understanding the three sources of organizational capital.
- Developing a systemic approach to developing organizational capital.
- Debrief: Focus on developing the value of each employee. What personal attribute should your organization seek to develop within each employee? What will be your approach to developing the value-generating mindset within each leader or manager?
Step Six – Leadership Feedback and Learning
Systems operating on feedback loops. Organizationally, these can be either intentional or unintentional. For example, a customer fires their prime supplier over a quality dispute. That is intentional feedback from the customer to the supplier. However, intentional feedback is an annual performance review with an employee, manager, or senior executive.
For leaders and managers, feedback concerning their leadership creates institutional leadership value. This perspective is a critical component of making leadership a core organizational competency. This organizational leadership competency is four times the value of individual leadership competency. Capturing this additional organizational value.
Learning Objectives:
- Moving from discipline-oriented appraisals to development appraisals.
- Designing the learning objectives for high-impact leadership.
- Implementing development-oriented leadership learning.
- What will be your approach to transition your leaders and managers to the mindset that they can be the primary drivers of culture?
Developing Your Plan and Debrief
The beauty of a systemic approach to culture formation and leadership is that when understood, every system element will impact the approach to every other element. For example, a healthcare executive transformed a healthcare organization of 7,000 employees, several hospitals and multiple clinics by establishing a rule and a routine. Every leader will round to their team each day. A logistics company transformed itself by establishing one rule – stop at first defect – while also breaking and jesting several others. Conversely, a manufacturing organization transformed itself by changing the mindset of its managers from being process managers to coaching and mentoring their employees.
Learning Objectives:
- Determining where to start.
- Determining the implications of the starting point.
- Design a detailed approach for each learning module we have covered.
