Tag Archives: cultural maturity

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Getting Better

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The other day a colleague postulated that all organizations have a maximum maturity/ performance capability plateau dictated by the culture and the resources.  I took strong exception to this opinion.

Its all about leadership

In high performing organizations (or high performing teams) the performance/ maturity bar moves higher continously.  Sitting on ones laurels (i.e., stagnating) leads results on a downward slope.

The culture of the organization/ team is motivated by leadership.  In the best case scenarios everyone takes some leadership role and the motivating effect is multiplied.

You get what you believe

If you believe some artificial maturity/ performance barrier exists it likely will.  It is a self fullfilling prophesy.  Continual striving for greater success does not happen by magic.

The leadership and of course the team members themselves need to both buy-in and therefore support this approach.  A belief that a hard ceiling exists is a powerful inhibitor.

For Example

My colleague noted, personal experience has led to their belief the plateau exists.  In their experience it always appears at some point. While the world might not be full of high performing organizations, they do exist.

Tesla, Apple, Google are all top of mind obvious examples of organizations that continually strive for improvement.  These are not static companies.  Constant change for the better is clearly  built into their DNA.

This companies outcomes speak for themselves.

So for me, it is a real hot button.  You need to believe in better and continously put out the effort to get there.  It never stops.  And if you believe otherwise, sadly it will probably be true.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Operational Frameworks for Higher Cultural Maturity

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All cultural environments are subject to an operational framework which the stakeholders use to interact with each other.

In organizational groups the cultural is formed by the members of the group and how it well it operates is guided by how each component of the basic operational framework is practiced (or not).

The Operational Framework

Here is a picture of the four basic operational components intrinsic to any basic culture

Slide1

Whether written or just intuitively understood the most basic cultural attribute your internal organization must have are rules.  These can be called team norms, they can be policies, they can be government enforced laws or a variety of other types of standards.  All of these have one thing in common, they guide behavior.

Any combination of these forms of rules/standards can co-exist, the key is they need to be supported by some authority (whether is by the taking of personal accountability or enforcement through discipline.)

Ultimately disagreement or misunderstanding of rules – where they were not well communicated or its not clear that they exist can result in an interpretation process, which usually requires a judge.

Cultural and Organizational Maturity

The level of maturity applied by the members of the cultural group  to the ongoing management of behavior both within and outside these rules can be a key measure of organizational maturity.

Typically high performing cultures/groups/ teams demonstrate an intrinsic understanding of this framework by each member of the team and this results in efficient and effective interactions and resulting team outcomes.

Can I use this framework to create improvement

One continuous improvement approach can be to assess your organizations culture against this framework to identify the weak areas or behaviors so that they can be addressed.

For example are there too many rules, too few, are they well or badly understood, is they little personal accountability taken, or too much personal accountability is applied versus consistent discipline and so on.