rakesh srivastva
Sep 1, 2018 · 4 min read

Building competitive culture : Key to transformation

Culture is organizational ‘dark matter’ — you can’t see it, but its effects are obvious,” said Blosch.

In this age of millennials, every transformation, in more than one ways should be a purpose transformation. It should be about people, so they can communicate and live by it.

The very people make culture! The very culture then affects people’s perception, behaviors and personalities. People and culture together are the building blocks of an organization.

A recent survey identified ‘culture’as a top-most barrier to an organizations ‘digital transformation’ journey. I would say, it’s true for any kind of transformation. To help organizations and its people adapt to the changes that a transformation initiative brings in, we need to develop ‘competitive’ culture. The rest(tools, technologies, process, skillsets and everything in between) will follow.

Building a competitive culture (regardless of job profiles and levels in hierarchy), will require one to lay down:

  1. What do you expect from team members. Call them as ‘culture goals
  2. How they go about achieving it. Call them as ‘behavioral competencies’ or ‘best practices
  3. Define principles to check actions. Let us call these as ‘guiding tenets’…….

In following paragraphs, I recommend a set of culture goals, behavioral competencies and guiding tenets that can help build a competitive culture within an organization or that can be used by an individual as well.

  1. The first culture goal is ‘Never give up

Never lose focus on what you want to achieve. A plan is a starting point. Between it and the goal lies many barriers and obstacles that can fail or slow you down.

Most have plans but very few succeed in achieving. The most common reason is the culture of rewarding success but not the effort. As a result, most of the times people give up or we do away with the goal.

In order to stay on course, one needs to exhibit ‘Grit’. How do you build grit in people?

A part of it is trait but a part of it can be developed by practicing ‘recognize effort, celebrate results and share learnings’. Consider this as guiding tenet for this goal. Leadership in particular needs to ensure this is practiced, so that people persist in pursuit of goal without giving up.

2. The second culture goal is ‘Think out of box’.

People tend to discuss more about problems than the solution. Biggest problem with problem is that it feeds off itself.

Encourage people to focus on solutions and help them find newer ways of working on them. As quoted, ‘There lies an opportunity in every challenge!’. Doesn’t mean you have to solve every problem. Save your best for the worst! ‘focus on what matters’. Consider this as one of the guiding tenet for this goal.

Equally important is to understand how we go about solving problems. As quoted by Einstein ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’.

Most of us have studied algebra during school days and the thumb rule was to simplify an algebraic expression by expanding it before solving it. This is our other guiding tenet — ‘simplify’. Today’s complex business/IT problems can be best solved by applying ‘design thinking’ approach. Leaders need to live by these tenets in order to nurture this innovative culture!

3. The third culture goal is ‘Be alert’.

Titanic was designed and built to be unsinkable and yet a series of factor made it sink. When ship was doomed to sink, the crew members had to improviseto delay the sinking of ship and save as many lives as possible. Yet more than 50% lives perished that day. Do you know why?

The then maritime regulations did not require to keep as many lifeboats as needed to save all. They just weren’t prepared for the worst-case scenario.

That brings us to the guiding tenet that is ‘Hope for the best but prepare for the worst!

No one likes changes to a plan but it happens all the time. Build a framework that not only allows to change course in shortest possible time but also minimizes the associated cost. ‘Agile/Lean’ is one of the widely accepted ways to achieve this.

Will framework alone be enough? No. We need people to exhibit one of the oldest survival trait- ‘agility/improvisation’. It is an ability which allow people to heighten their sense of awareness and softening their focus without losing it. Leadership should live by the guiding tenet ‘Fail fast & celebrate failures’.

4. The fourth culture goal is ‘Take ownership’.

Most organizations have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Over a period of time this has resulted into a culture of hierarchy and clear boundaries between areas of responsibilities. This often results in different priorities, disconnected efforts and lack of synergy between teams, impacting overall organisation goal. One of the biggest challenge that any organisation has to deal with.

Having a ‘collaborative cross-functional, self-directed and leader less teams’ is a good solution. The only thing that can fail this is lack of accountability. Let us understand the difference between responsibility and accountability.

Responsibility is the duty and ability to respond or take action. Almost everyone understands this part as there are consequences of not doing it.

Accountability is the ability to report on events (good or bad) and keep those informed who are responsible for taking action. In other word’s accountability is a responsibility to monitor and report. Mostly this lies with the leader of the team. Note the widely acknowledged leadership principle ‘There are no bad teams, just bad leaders!’.

This calls for everyone to be responsible for monitoring and reporting on events related to their operations or business.

To sum it up, change is the only constant thing. With technology changing faster than ever, there is no time to settle down. One has to be on edge all the time and the only thing that gives you a fighting chance is to be competitive! Be it sports, education, health, business and everything.

“A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.!” said Helen

I leave you with this thought. Thank you for reading this. Please share your experience and feedback!