For the first of the Douglas Jackson Guest Blogs we are delighted to welcome to the stage Jason Wright; Jason is a Senior Leadership professional presently working in the Contact Centre industry for a FTSE 100 company. Jason has many years’ experience as a Senior Manager, Trainer and Coach and is the author of ‘Making Sense of Performance Management’. Many of you may also have had the chance to meet and see Jason as a chairperson or speaker at some of the Contact Centre and Customer Experience industry events, as we at #TeamDJ have. With performance management, targets and employee engagement an everyday focus for all Leaders and Managers, we asked Jason what he thought were the ingredients which help to create a winning culture – over to Jason:
What is at the heart of a winning culture? Great leadership, strong teamwork, powerful talent, effective planning, sound decision making…
All relevant ingredients, but let’s simplify the answer to begin with – it is people.
People are at the heart of any culture – long before it becomes winning, or otherwise!
Whenever and wherever people come together cultures are established. Something as simple as “in jokes” amongst friends proves this point on a small scale – but the cultural bond created is just as powerful as with much more significant & influential groups. The pride, the passion, the willingness to defend the group, and the sense of belonging to something that matters to them personally, are all evident to some degree.
Recognising this, everyone within a team environment should accept responsibility for their personal contribution to the team culture. It’s not reasonable to expect that this will happen automatically – a contribution will be made automatically, but it won’t necessarily be a responsible one!
This is where leadership becomes so important in creating a positive, or winning culture. It’s the leaders role to create the pride, passion, and sense of belonging in the group by making what they do really matter to them personally. Once that has been achieved each individual will take personal responsibility for making a positive contribution to the team culture.
Cultures are built on ‘inputs’ not ‘outputs’. Leaders do well to remember this and to focus on those inputs that will influence the culture they desire. If the outputs, or results, are not in line with expectations then great leaders will adapt & develop what they put in to the team rather than just challenging the outputs and asking for, or demanding, a better performance.
The beauty of developing a consistent range of effective inputs is that the outputs start to take care of themselves. When this starts to happen it can truly be said that a “Winning Culture” has been created. Everyone will share the confidence that great results are commonplace for the team they are a part of. This creates even more pride and an even greater contribution – the winning culture is embedded, and it will continue to generate high performance outcomes across any range of measures.
We would like to thank Jason for his thoughts and time taken to feature here today. To see more from Jason you can visit his own blog by clicking here.
What do you think makes a winning or positive culture? We would really like to hear your thoughts and comments.
Please also let us know if you have an idea for a subject or future blog, or if you too would like to be involved in a future Douglas Jackson Guest Blog. You can email: mail@douglas-jackson.com or call us on: Tel: 0845 620 9720
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Good to hear you talking about making ‘contributions’ Jason. Identifying opportunties to contribute and then being recognised for these contributions are important drivers of engagement and positive cultures. My observation is that this is often localised and the challenge is to create a holistic culture across the business. Unfortunately organisational structures/bureaucracy and a lack of social/collaborative behaviour are two of the major barriers. People have lots of skills and talents that go untapped by organisations that could help solve problems better, faster and at lower cost. That’s one area where I think Employee Social Networks (or Enterprise Social Networks to be precise) are starting to change the landscape inside leading organisations. They are removing boundaries and allowing access to skills and knowledge like never before. I think they are the recipe for a winning culture.
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Hi David, Many thanks for taking the time to comment, you make a good point regarding Employee and Enterprise Social Networks and how these can help organisations open up untapped skills and talents they already have, but are not fully utilising, this would certainly help deliver a winning culture.
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