Culture Transformation

“Culture is behaviour at scale”. (Bain & Company, Inc. 1996 – 2022).

Daniel Coyle (Coyle 2018) spent years researching the secrets of highly successful groups. He was interested in how people show they care, how excellent groups unlock true synergy, and what is most important in achieving consistent success.

In Coyle’s book, The Culture Code, a key finding was that interaction is more important than individual skills.

Daniel Coyle visited and researched eight of the most successful groups in the world over a four-year period, and this is what he found. The top three criteria for success were these:

• Build psychological safety: engender trust and belonging.
• Share vulnerability: be transparent and show fallibility.
• Establish purpose: clearly communicate and enrol others in shared goals.

Coyle contested that culture is created based on what we see rather than what is said. Words are noise whereas behaviour is action which shows whether we are safe and connected.

Over the last ten years, I have immersed myself in the business of accelerated improvement, supporting leaders and teams in upstream oil and gas, to unlock their potential and exceed their expectations.

In parallel I have read and listened to fifty performance related books, while also writing four of my own.

My experiences and observations show that any competent individual or team can transform by implementing the right system to the point where best practice is automatic. (Wigham 2020).

This requires mindset, method, and something I call “moodset”.

Mindset is led by leadership! It involves openness to possibility, openness to objective assessment, openness to coaching, and a belief in better. It includes optimism and resilience in equal measure. Mindset is critical for initiative, then essential for acceleration to automatic.

Method is system-discipline. It requires an uncompromising adherence to proven process even when it is the last thing anyone feels like doing. The process may not be perfect, but it certainly works. Method allows repeated practice to become automatic.

Moodset describes the prevailing performance-climate. It includes intangible but invaluable behaviours and deliverables which maintain the right atmosphere for team excellence.

Mindset

Dr. Carol Dweck (Dweck 2019) is recognised as one of the foremost experts on mindset. Her students wanted her to write a book about her accumulated expertise in the realm of mindset, so she obliged and compiled her masterpiece, Mindset in 2019.

She unpacks the mindsets, fixed and growth. Fixed mindsets see abilities and qualities as relatively unchangeable, whereas growth mindsets believe that people can change, improve, and learn through application and effort. Her thesis is that we can change our mindsets.

She provides several examples of fixed and growth mindset behaviours. She explains that we are all a mix of both but that through awareness and increased attention, we can catch ourselves when we are holding ourselves back, and we can generate a growth-mindset approach to focus on what we can control vs what we cannot.

Growth-mindset leaders and teams get a thrill from what is hard and from trying hard to learn something over time. Indeed, continuous improvement journeys take time and require effort, they involve failure, but that failure does not define the team. The effort and the learning define the team.

Dweck’s research showed that the following traits were noticeable at growth-mindset organisations. Trustworthiness, commitment, loyalty, agility, creativity, innovation, risk-taking support, integrity, a culture of development, care for wellbeing, collaboration.

A growth mindset is effectively a belief in better. It is never content because there is always more that can be done, but milestones and successes should also be celebrated because that fuels the fire to become more, for ourselves, and for others. As I have heard said many times; “Consistent hard work beats complacent talent over time”.

Method

In his book, The Barcelona Way (Hughes 2018), Professor Damian Hughes researches a proven approach to creating a high-performance team culture as seen at the football club FC Barcelona.

I found it additionally interesting to watch the Amazon Prime series All or Nothing: Manchester City at the same time as I was reading this book because one of the central figures in both stories is Pep Guardiola; previously captain and coach at Barcelona, now manager at Manchester City. Any culture is driven by leadership behaviour so being able to observe as well as read about Guardiola’s leadership was highly informative.

Hughes references five culture models: Star model – Real Madrid (hire the best players), Autocracy – Chelsea (rotate the manager), Bureaucracy – Liverpool (profit over performance), Engineering – Borussia Dortmund (logic and detail), Commitment – FC Barcelona (more than a club).

The book then goes on to unpack a Commitment Culture. A model for success in any team. The acronym BARCA represents five steps to achieve this.

1. Big Picture – Camp Nou | Cruyff | Catalan (Identity)
2. Arc of Change: Cultural Signposts – Dream, Leap, Fight, Climb and Arrive (Transformation)
3. Recurring Systems and Processes – Constant Repetition gets the Message Home (Ritual)
4. Cultural Architects and Organisational Heroes – Respected Role Models (Legacy)
5. Authentic Leadership – Stand for Something (Leadership)

The bracketed words are my interpretations based on personal experience, of the steps that Hughes puts forward.

Moodset

Hughes emphasises the importance of the environment; the atmosphere and the energy surrounding a high-performing team. It is more than twice as important as the actual technical training focus in any workspace. (Hughes 2018). I call this “Moodset”. Good coaches create the right climate for the team to perform.

Cultural fit between the leader and the team is very important according to Hughes. It is often overlooked or assessed in hindsight. Using the right questions to assess the cultural fit of a leader for a team can help to get insight. Asking about preferred work environment, leadership style and values can help provide useful clues as to a prospect’s suitability for the leadership role.

Authentic leaders articulate their priorities, then they apply consistency and transparency to all aspects of their leadership. Leading by example and honouring trademark behaviours is critical. Hughes references Guardiola’s approach of placing guardrails to protect the right culture – a way “wide enough to empower but narrow enough to guide”.

Guardiola’s guiding principles or trademark behaviours were these; show humility, work hard, team first. Intuitively we know this is required to achieve excellence, yet too many teams allow ego to detract from collaboration and progress.

A commitment culture is about the journey, not the destination. It can be achieved by groups who are committed to doing what it takes.

True culture transformation requires world-class servant leadership, an inspiring and highly recognisable identity, the right rituals, and of course exceptional role models or “first followers” within the wider leadership group.