How People and Culture (PnC) Can Become Critical to an Organisation’s Success: Tech 2.0 (Part 1 of 2)
Today, the organisations that stay ahead of the competition are focusing on people and culture more than ever before. And it’s not in the form of ping pong tables and trust exercises. It’s about digital leaders and People and Culture (PnC) amplifying each other’s strengths.
So, what’s the core principle?
Make PnC critical to an organisation’s success.
“People and culture lie at the heart of organizational performance
and typically drive both success and failure.”- Deloitte, The Digital Workplace
We no longer live in a world where organisations have an HR function that is utilised for compliance, hiring, firing and performance management. The traditional function of HR has evolved and rebranded itself to People and Culture (PnC).
Today, good PnC functions create and shape a positive culture for an organisation and its employees. This is great.
But, it’s not enough.
To succeed and thrive in today’s world we must evolve the PnC function even further — to the point where all leaders in the organisation would say:
“PnC are critical to our success. We simply wouldn’t have achieved our goals if it wasn’t for the close partnership we have with PnC”.
Becoming Critical To Success
For PnC to become critical to success the function needs to evolve from creating great cultures to one that also contributes to building high-performance organisations.
In digital organisations, I recommend the 4 step, PnC High-Performance Organisation Cycle as shown in Fig 1. In this article, I will be discussing the first two steps of this cycle (part II will contain steps 3 and 4).
The cycle begins with the intent and desire for PnC to become critical to success. This intention focuses our attention and activity in the right areas (for information about Intention, see Part III of my book, Evolving Digital Leadership).
In step 2, we think like a technologist. This involves communicating using methods that most suit the way technologists think. You’ve heard the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words”, well to us technologists, “a model is worth a thousand pictures.” We’ve been trained to think in models and frameworks in order to understand the complexities of technology.
Why is this important?
Well, organisations are complicated, and in my experience, most people don’t understand the components of a high-performance digital organisation (such as Mission, Strategy, Agile etc) and how they fit together. To help with this challenge I have developed the Tech 2.0 framework (see Figure 2) to help you diagnose your organisation, create and align all the components required for sustained success.
Tech 2.0 Organisations
Just like a great PnC function, a high-performance Tech 2.0 organisation starts and ends with people. At the top, we have a human-centred mission or purpose, a vision, and two highly aligned streams that address high-performance delivery (left-hand stream) and high-performance culture (right-hand stream). These streams flow down from the mission and vision and are underpinned by the people (you, me and our teams) in the organisation.
The Tech 2.0 Delivery stream is driven by the organization’s mission, strategy and goals (OKRs etc). Tribes are then used to organise people (Agile Teams) into solving customer-centric problems (using Design Thinking) and develop products and services that leverage technology to their advantage.
The Tech 2.0 Culture stream is also driven by the same mission and vision which includes the people-centric nature of the organisation. This then cascades down to meaningful values and recognition systems that support the growth of individuals and teams. Leaders in these organisations care about their people and are constantly developing them and themselves — a part of which is to develop their own coaching and mentoring skills.
Tech 2.0 Organisations aim to ensure that the two streams of Delivery and Culture are aligned and amplify (rather than oppose) each other. The delivery stream recognises that PnC are critical to their success. Likewise, PnC know that Delivery’s success is their own success. Organisations that are highly-performing in today’s disruptive world continuously adapt these streams to align and meet the ever-changing demands of business.
But as PnC, what happens if my organisation is not “aligned”?
If your PnC function currently feels misaligned within your organisation, don’t worry. A lot of organisations experience this in varying degrees. Some have all the elements of “culture” (the fridge full of beer, a gym, values posted up on the wall), but really only care about Delivery. Some have colossal amounts of culture — but no delivery.
Through extensive interviews and experience with digital organisations, I have found that there are 6 main organisational patterns (see Figure 3).
Which of the 6 patterns most closely resembles your organisation today?
- Delivery Organisations
One of the most common patterns. Delivery organisations value performance and paradoxically never achieve it because of the lack of emphasis on culture. - Espoused Culture
These organisations are really Delivery organisations that say they also value culture but, their behaviours demonstrate otherwise. - Aligned (Target State)
Aligned organisations focus on the whole picture and integrate delivery and culture to create truly high-performance organisations that people love to work in. - Incongruent
These organisations have components of both delivery and culture. However, these components are misaligned and cause friction in the culture and reduce delivery performance. - Confused
Confused organisations have some components and are missing others. Often the components they have are not aligned across the organisation — a common pattern for organisations undergoing transformation. - Community
The opposite of a Delivery organisation, the Community overemphasizes the culture at the expense of performance and impact. More common in charities and NFP.
Organisations are in a constant state of flux. But with a clearly defined purpose and an aligned vision, both Delivery and Culture streams can work together to overcome imbalances and adapt for success.
To help your PnC team become critical to success, follow the first two steps of the High-Performance Organisation Cycle: Step 1. Hold the Intention to be Critical to Success and Step 2. Think Like A Technologist and use the Tech 2.0 model to visualise and discuss the existence and alignment of the components in your organisation.
By sharing this framework with key people in your organisation you can begin to become a key part of the organisation’s success.”
And remember:
There is no such thing as a high-performance organisation, only one that’s currently highly performing.
Stay tuned for Part II of this article in which I will discuss steps 3 and 4 of the High-Performance Cycle and the steps you can take to evolve your organisation to higher performance.
For more info and details of my new book Evolving Digital Leadership, check out: https://evolvingdigitalleadership.com/
Find me on twitter https://twitter.com/JamesCuriously
Linked-in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-brett/
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