From a performance culture to a contribution culture - how to liberate the energy and talents of your people
Written by Dr. Meena Thuraisingham, Director TalentInvest, 2020
The focus on maximising performance has long roots in industrial age thinking at a time when organisations were designed to become more formalised, stratified, standardised, routinised and enforced. Top down goal setting and KPIs became the way in which organisations demanded performance and ensured centralised control. At the same time it had the effect, over time, of imperceptibly sucking out human initiative, ingenuity and creativity out of organisations.
Today most workforce engagement surveys reveal that only about 15-20% are genuinely engaged, 50% or more are not engaged and the rest activity disengaged, possibly operating in quietly undermining ways. On average about 70% of companies that employ 1000 plus people report that new ideas are treated with scepticism or hostility. Employees increasingly report lower levels of task discretion. In a recent survey in the UK 70% of employees reported that originality is not critical to their jobs.
Rarely questioned, the tenets of a performance-driven culture include power vested in positions and hierarchies, senior executives setting strategy, authority and accountability trickling down in the form of KPIs, managers assessing performance and reward linked to rank. Because a culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behaviour, these practices are accompanied by hidden beliefs and unforeseen behaviours. Hiding one’s deficiencies from others and from ourselves, rather than acknowledging weaknesses and learning from others becomes the silent personal norm. Fears associated with a binary zero-sum game in which people either succeed or fail, become winners or loser, scored as wrong or right, judged as weak or strong becomes a cultural norm.
These are organisations that inadvertently encourage staying between the lines conformance. Operating outside my pay grade can be seen as politically risky and subconsciously avoided. Conformance not contribution becomes a deeply held value. In 2014, psychologists Kegan and Lahey experts in adult development (on which Carol Dweck’s research on the Growth Mindset is largely based) described very different organisations. Ones that are committed to developing every individual by weaving personal growth into daily work. In their ground-breaking work they described 20 companies they followed over 10 years who had taken deliberate steps to build developmental cultures. These companies worked on the core assumption that people can grow through the right balance of challenge and support. These were companies that were not easy or comfortable to operate in. In such companies people worried less about how good they were but about how quickly they were learning. There was no divide between what people were willing to say around the water cooler and what they were willing to say in the meeting room. Truth-telling characterised these cultures.
Company success and excellence and individual fulfillment need not be at odds. In these company environments even individual screw-ups were viewed as the ‘learning edge’ to the next level of contribution. Kegan and Lahey found that gaps between strategy and execution were often created by the “conversations we are not having, the synchronicities with others we’re not achieving, and the work that, out of self-protection, we’re avoiding”.
Since the original work by Kegan and Lahey, new standout examples of such contribution cultures have revealed in more recent studies - Buurtzorg, Handelbanken (both studied by the British Academy in their recent seminal 2019 Future of the Corporation work) to name a few. Some have always been around, perhaps not always noticed in popular press such as W L Gore, John Lewis Partnership, MARS to name a few.
In these developmental cultures, discussion formats such as the fishbowls are ‘the way we work to solve our problems’. Undiscussables are routinely invited in conversations as a means of improving business outcomes, as the author personally experienced while consulting with MARS and early in her Intel career. These cultures allow a wider circle of people to learn together about an initiative that may have stalled or an investment that may not have produced the expected return. Examining a failed investment decision will be accompanied by a robust root-cause analysis of the data used, the decision criteria, and steps taken to execute on the investments. But it goes further, exploring the personal dimension of decision making - teams openly probing the thinking of those who make the final calls, asking, “What in your thinking may have led to this sub-optimal investment decision?”. In the end there is a “clearing”, a personal sense of progress – I have risked my willingness to be vulnerable with my peers/team, nothing bad came of it for me, and I and my team learnt from it and am better for it.
These companies pay a lot of attention to who they hire. A HDS (Hogan) anchored conversation with prospective candidates and new comers is used to openly explore the things that may derail them early on. There is a generous embracing of the unique human-ness that we all bring into our roles. All jobs/roles are designed as stretch roles. Performance contracts are replaced with developmental agreements where performance expectations and goals are given the same status as developmental expectations and goals. Employees hunt for opportunities that will ensure they learn something new each week, roles are structured around capabilities and therefore are ever-changing and are defined by the extent to which individuals in them are learning, growing and deepening their capabilities. Long tenure in a given role is no longer acceptable. Leaders and specialists see the purpose of their expertise as giving it away to someone who is coming up. Jobs no longer becomes static units of the strategy but the dynamic energy that drives performance and builds organisational resilience. Subtle aspects of organisation design are paid attention to such as how work flows between teams, how often planned and unplanned conversations occur and so on. Learning is everyone’s business and its everyone’s business to address what is not working and contribute to making it work, comfortable to step outside assumed decision rights. Feedback is treated as a business skill. Learning to learn becomes a key individual success factor that drives who gets hired, who thrives and who makes a real difference.
The contribution culture has five principles at its heart: Experimentation, Meritocracy, Openness, Community and Ownership. To shift from a performance culture to a contribution culture existing management systems and processes such as goal setting, resource allocation, measurement and evaluation, reward and recognition, structure, hiring and promotion need to be dismantled and rebuilt to truly reflect these five principles. Set up management hackathons comprising multi-disciplinary, multi-level, multi-unit teams to do this important work. At the organisational level, strategy becomes a firm wide conversation as it is in MARS, the entire organisation becomes a laboratory (John Lewis Partnership still refers to their ownership model as an “industrial experiment”), roles are built around capabilities as they are in Intel and teams self-manage as in W L Gore. More recently HSBC took the brave move to enable employees to uncover the nature of their own potential and seek out the development they felt they needed, replacing what was historically a top down approach to determining who had potential, dictated by manager opinion. Rather than just getting from followers what the leader wants, the leader seeks to get everything that each person has to offer and to continually grow their strengths and capacity to contribute more. This is not an environment that many of us in organisations today recognise, but it is critical to success.
In a contribution culture we see a complete unity of personal purpose and effort. There is no other way for organisations to master an increasingly uncertain, unknowable future. And this is because in the coming decade companies will need to compete on their rate of learning and imagination and the secret sauce will be everyone bringing everything they have to offer to the table.
To explore these ideas and for support with your culture change agenda contact meena@talentinvest.com.au