CULTURE IS THE PROBLEM: CULTURE IS THE SOLUTION

PERFORMANCE DRIVEN ORGANIZATIONS

BY DR. TAYO ADULOJU,
Executive Director , Institute of Workforce Development & Group Deputy Managing Partner, Workforce Group

One of the measures of organizational leadership effectiveness is corporate performance. Business

and Public Leaders are measured by their ability to take high-level goals and translate them into
results, through their workforce. Boards demand it from their Chief Executives, Chief Executives
demand it from their Managers, Managers demand it from their Team Leaders and Members, and
Team Members demand it from one another. It is therefore, a foregone conclusion that stakeholders
expect, desire and demand that Business and Public Organizations perform. The concept of
performance and result-orientation is now at least a well-accepted mantra across the Society. What
seems to be a more difficult concept is actually development of a Culture of Discipline and High
Performance. In one hundreds (100) interviews with CEOs in 2014, as part of a Change Management
Survey a leading research firm noted that the 89% of the issues on their minds was how to drive
Organizational Performance and 78% agreed that with respect to performance, the Culture was the
Problem, and in every case, the CEOs where convinced the Changing the Culture was the Solution.
Building the right culture maybe the hardest thing that a Leader does and maybe the most rewarding
Legacy that he or she leaves behind.
In the landmark well-researched book by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, on the Laws of Performance,
the authors explain that rewriting the culture is the key to rewriting the future for people and
organizations. The result is the transformation of a situation, leading to a dramatic elevation in
performance. Rewrite the future and peoples actions naturally shift: from disengaged to proactive,
from resigned to inspired, from frustrated to innovative. Rewriting an organizations future is the task
of the Leader and it cannot be delegated. Sometimes a CEO pays a Consulting Firm to build an
expensive performance management system while they attend to more important things. Sometimes
executives delegate the need to change the culture of non-performance to the HR Department. These
stakeholders are essential, but without Executive Level sponsorship and modeling the culture will not
and cannot change.
Firstly, Organizational Leaders must drive institutionalizing transformational new experiences, beliefs
and actions about how things will be done, what will be celebrated and what will be sanctioned. Leaders
that change their culture take their people on a journey. If you cannot carry people along, the culture
will not change. If a Leader for example says efficiency is crucial to his strategic agenda, people across
the organization must experience efficiency from the Executive Office to frontlines of the business. If the
Executive says the service excellence is the top priority, that belief must be translated into Executive
Actions that supports, celebrates, reinforces and rewards all the behaviours across the Organization
that deliver Service Excellence to all stakeholders. If however the Executive does not have time for

monthly performance reviews; or if weekly meetings are not designed to measure progress on the
strategic goals; or if strategy is reviewed once a year, instead of quarterly to allow the organization to
adjust to changing realities, before its too late; or if the leader doesnt insist on realism and allow
teams confront brutal facts at meetings; wrong behaviors are rewarded and the culture will not change.
Secondly, Organizational Leaders must lead the Discipline of Execution. The Leaders must insist that
their Organization and Team focus on The Wildly Important Goals . Based on the Principle of
Criticality, There are 2 or 3 Wildly Important Goals that Drive Any Successful Outcome. Once the
Wildly Important Goals are defined, they must be understood. Sometimes leaders confuse
strategic articulation with strategic clarity. The fact that employees know what the strategy is, does not
mean that they understand what their part in the execution of the strategy is. In order to help members
of the team and organization perform, the Leader must establish a Cadence of Accountability where
everyone knows exactly what part of the plan they are responsible for, how their contributions will be
measured and when it will be measured. A Cadence of Accountability comes from taking the Wildly
Important Goals and cascading it using Compelling Scorecards at All Levels within the Organization.
Each Individual, Each Team and Each Manager must own a Compelling Scoreboard.
Thirdly, Organizational Leaders must lead Measurement Administration. While HR or the Strategy
Department may manage the Performance Management System, Leaders must drive the process of
determining what to measure. Visionary Leaders tend to lead with leading measures (indicators of the
future performance). Effective managers tend to manage lagging measures (indicators of past
performance). Great Organizational Leaders do both. A Leader for example may measure revenue
generation as a measure of past performance and insist on measuring market development,
operational efficiency as a measure of future performance. Organizations pay attention to what their
leaders are measuring, monitoring and tracking. So as Peter Drucker put it, What cannot be Measured
cannot be Managed and What You Measure, Your People will Focus On.
Fourthly, the Organizational Leader must mobilize leadership potential across the Organization through
instructing, mentoring, coaching and counseling leaders around and below. The development of
Leaders under the major leader creates a leadership pipeline that ensures the culture that the Leader
is building becomes sustainable, enduring and robust.
So, you may ask, what is the role of the Head of Strategy and HR, or the Consultant? Well, they deploy
the Performance Management System, but the Leader must insist that the System achieves
Transformation, Creates the Discipline of Execution and allows him or her to lead measurement
administration. The work of HR and Strategy Managers is therefore to gain not just the buy-in but also
the Executive Sponsorship that secures the commitment of Leaders to do the work required for
successful culture change. So when all is said and done, the leader must change the culture to change
the performance outcomes. Thats why culture is source of the performance and execution gap and
thats changing the culture is the source of the problem.