Is your culture inspiring mediocrity or greatness?

Many of our clients are trying to drive higher performance and better outcomes. While some have the necessary ingredients — a generally good culture, the right agenda and strategic initiatives — the desired results are elusive. Often, it can be easy to diagnose when they ask us to help them figure out why.

In my early days of learning how to measure, assess and change culture, a mentor of mine would say, “you can always tell what is really going on by working out what temperature the air conditioner is set at, and then looking at what happens when it gets hotter or colder than the default setting”.

It was a metaphor. Imagine that a business sets the air conditioning at 22 degrees, which is the temperature that will provide the most comfort for the majority. When the ambient temperature rises above or falls below 22 degrees, the aircon’s thermostat will trigger hot or cold air to blow to fix that problem to maintain the comfortable 22 degrees at all times as expected, for comfort.

What my mentor was saying is that culture works the same way.

Your culture, consciously or not, has a predetermined comfort level. When that comfort level is set to mediocrity, leaders act to preserve it. They spend excessive time reprimanding or overlooking subpar performance (blowing heat), while stifling or suppressing high performers (blowing cold), perpetuating mediocrity.

Finding out the temperature of your culture and whether it matches your agenda is the first step in creating a culture of high performance. This, in my opinion, is the simplest way to find out why the desired outcomes are elusive.

| When you accept mediocrity, you get more of it.

Cultures of mediocrity are those where doing more than the bare minimum is acceptable and where standing out and performing well is uncomfortable for others and this is bad for business. Where “flying under the radar” or “ducking for cover” if you make a mistake or underperform is the name of the game because no one needs to “rock the boat”.

Never will settling for mediocrity as a comfort level allow you to achieve your goal of high performance!

In virtually all cases, we discover that the culture comfort level is too low and this is why initiatives to promote high performance fail. It's a straightforward analysis. You can have all the initiatives, but if your thermostat is set at a level that encourages mediocrity, it will always adjust to that level. The “thermostat” will make sure of it.

Resetting the cultural thermostat requires effort and patience and a multi-pronged approach - an evolution not a revolution. Nonetheless, there are a couple of simple actions that can have a more immediate positive impact. These are:

1. Define Success

Often talked about, rarely done well. It needs to be clearly defined at a corporate level and understood at an individual level. HR departments need to take a lead role here.

You must go beyond the purpose and vision, and the values and behaviours. What success looks like, how success (not what) will be measured, and exactly what will happen when the temperature rises or falls. Part of this will require defining what failure looks like - this is often missed. Many organisations promote their purpose/vision/values and behaviours, but they rarely or never make the effort to explain or train what failure looks like.

Take this example. A client had a clear cultural value that espoused a hard line on high integrity and corporate compliance. This was made clear during training when people were inducted, but once inside the organisation, rarely spoken of again. There were no clear processes or practices that aligned with this value and no framework for what failure looked like.

The finance department had been adopting an accounting practice that was lazy resulting in a significant misrepresentation of the tax liability. The head of the finance department was “fine” with it as it saved time and effort and he considered the margin of error to be “acceptable” and the impact “wasn’t a big deal”. This was because “near enough is good enough” was the actual cultural value, not high integrity and high corporate compliance.

Nothing illegal happened here, there was no ill intent, just mediocrity that came at a significant cost.

Despite the high bar set by the espoused value, custom and practice had dipped well below that and everyone had become very comfortable with mediocrity.

The risk would have been reduced if this business had defined success in terms of integrity and compliance (sound accounting practices with no errors), had the processes to support it (more rigour, training, and auditing), and was clear about what failure looked like (working outside the process, failing to comply with Australian Standards), and a leader who would tolerate nothing less.

2. Knowing vs Continuous Improvement

Businesses and leaders who prioritise doing what has always been done or being all-knowing, over continuous improvement will produce mediocrity. If people think of themselves as experts, there will be no motivation to challenge the status quo. When curiosity and innovation are not encouraged, chances for continuous improvement and better performance outcomes are missed. Kodak or Blockbuster serve as the best examples of this (google it).

If your business thinks it’s the best at what it does and no one does it better, this may be mediocrity shrouded in arrogance, or a false sense of security, just waiting to be pipped at the post.

Consider implementing a program that creates opportunities to challenge the status quo. It doesn’t have to be complex, it can be a simple business improvement workshop or project that fosters dialogue to challenge the comfort level. With the right facilitation, you will invariably learn a lot about what is holding you back from greater outcomes.

3. Leader Apathy

Addressing leader apathy will be your biggest win. If you have leaders that do any of the following, you have leader apathy:

• avoid conflict, decision-making, poor behaviour, poor performance

• default to excuses to explain everything

• have little or no energy, little or no ambition

• avoid thinking outside the box, settling for the easy way

• are not leading or managing the people, only the task

Leader apathy is contempt in disguise. It will breed mediocrity faster than anything else, but worse, it’s catchy.

Aimless leadership, that is responding reactively and isn’t clear about what success does and doesn’t look like, will single-handedly drive mediocrity and negate any chance of high performance.

If your leadership tends to operate in a prism of ”it’s too hard”, “it’s not worth it”, “it’s complicated”, “it will lead to nothing”, or chooses the path of least resistance, fails to manage subpar performance, fails to encourage and recognise great performance, and generally aims for everything to be somewhere in the middle to make life “easier”, then you simply must take action.

You need to understand the thinking (diagnostically) that is driving this behaviour. Being tough on performance means leadership performance, not how the leaders do their job, but how well they lead.

“As a long-time leader, I admit I have tolerated mediocrity along the way, but I think for the most part I have not. What I know is that those who have worked with me for a long time, from job to job, did so because I was mostly tough on performance and strived to deliver greatness.” - Marnie Brokenshire

In his timeless book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins writes an extensive study of how “good is the enemy of great”. His analysis provides empirical proof that good to great companies focus not only on what to do but equally on what not to do and what to stop doing. His research proves that transitioning from mediocrity to greatness does not require a revolutionary change strategy, rather a mandate of “discipline” and the place to start is by having “the right people on the bus and in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus”. You’ve heard it before, it’s an oft-used phrase, Jim coined it.

You can define your success and failure clearly and create a mandate for continuous improvement, but without the right leaders and people, you have nothing. You must be tough on performance and you must be tough on leadership behaviour; if you aren't, you will just be accepting mediocrity, and better results will always be elusive.

If you would like to learn more about our leadership and culture programs, or how to implement some of these solutions, reach out for a discussion.