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High performing cultures share five key values

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An article by William C. Finnie provided some insight into five key values that support high performing cultures of companies like GE, 3M and Johnson & Johnson. The five values discovered by Dr. Robert Lefton, co-founder of Psychological Associates, who works with Fortune 500 companies using behavioral science to provide business solutions, are:

  1. Openness and candor: Nothing truly good happens without candor. Jack Welch (”Winning” chapter 2) points to three ways candor leads to higher performance. First, it involves more people, and more ideas surface. Second, candor results in speedier decisions, a necessity in the global marketplace. Finally, candor cuts costs by replacing meaningless meetings and mind-numbing presentations with “real conversations.”
  2. Collaboration: The benefits of collaboration are enormous. Once Detroit automakers got research and development, engineering, operations and marketing working together, the time to launch a new car was cut from 60 months to 30 months.It’s easy to talk about teamwork but difficult to achieve. People are naturally protective and territorial. Protecting your turf is almost evolutionary. You have to rise above it.
  3. Common shared goals: This is another way of saying a good mission and compelling vision. It’s what Jim Collins calls a BHAG — Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (”Built to Last” 1994). A shared goal that grabs people in the gut is the “hard strategy” element that can motivate people to work together.
  4. Involvement: Getting the different perspectives of everyone on the management team leads to a better mission statement and strategy. Similarly, departmental plans are better when they reflect broad involvement. More important, getting your people involved in developing and discussing common shared goals leads to understanding and commitment, which are essential for effective implementation.
  5. Feedback: Feedback is formalized candor. It compares performance to plan. It identifies root causes for deviations. It eliminates “hockey stick” projections because you have to start this year’s plan by comparing last year’s actual performance with last year’s plan. Feedback is essential for the continuous improvement of both people and businesses.

These attributes are directly related to high performance. This does not mean that all organisations should have similar cultures, each company has it’s own unique identity and character, however these values should be lived by leaders and encouraged at all levels.

As a practicing leader how does your leadership style compare to these five values? Are you open? Do you collaborate? Do you involve others? Do you provide feedback?

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Comments

4 Responses to “High performing cultures share five key values”

  1. RisingSunofNihon on September 3rd, 2006 11:15 PM

    Interesting article there. I can definitely see how these five values can lead to higher performance U.S. corporations. However, I don’t agree that these are absolutely necessary in order for a company to perform well. Take Japanese companies, for instance. They’re certainly not as open and candid, nor do they rely on/value feedback very much. Yet many of them (Toyota, for example) still perform very well.

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