By TC North
July 7, 2011
Imagine this: You’re in an environment where everyone is laser-focused, working with passion and excitement and being optimally productive (wouldn’t that be blissful!?). In world-class athletics, we refer to this as the flow state. At times, individual athletes experience it and teams attain it — and it creates optimal performance. In business and sports, you must be in a high-performance environment or culture to achieve the flow state and perform optimally.
The effect of a high-performance culture: A high-performance culture creates loyal employees who, in turn, create loyal customers who, in turn, make high-performance culture companies highly profitable.
So what makes a high-performance culture? There are both known characteristics of high-performance cultures and some relatively unknown characteristics of high-performance cultures. Here are seven of the known characteristics of high-performance cultures (there are others):
Seven known characteristics of high-performance cultures:
1. Shared mission and vision. Everyone understands and buys in to the mission (purpose) and vision (ideal future state) of the organization.
2. Aligned. Everyone’s goals and actions are aligned with accomplishing the vision.
3. Customer-focused. The ultimate focus is on the external customer for whom the organization provides services or products. There’s also a focus on internal customers because many people’s deliverables are to somebody within the company.
4. Performance-driven. High-performing organizations purge entitlement and reward performance.
5. Trust. There’s open, honest communication, and people trust others to complete what they commit to in the agreed-on time frame at the level of quality expected and they never have to watch their back.
6. Teamwork. Everyone relies on one another. Nothing gets done in a vacuum.
7. Integrity. All decisions and actions reflect agreed-on moral and ethical principles. The Enron crash exemplified the importance of integrity to sustainable high performance.