The research leading to The Performance Triangle confirms ‘people are the most important assets’. But, good intentions are not enough to win the game in today’s complex, uncertain, and knowledge driven environment.
The task is to make it real: A people-centric culture helps organizations tap into the full potential of its talents’ knowledge and ideas to release the productive energy for relentless innovation.
- People-centric culture: knowledge, ideas, thoughts, actions in motion
- Energy is innovation: a deeper look into cultural barriers and enablers
- Release productive energy: invest in attention and time
Nurture a people-centric culture
Use the potential. From the insights that clients around the world acquire using our design check we conclude that organizations effectively use only 65% of the potential at their disposition. We further know that whatever the challenge a firm faces, people need to be able to close the gap between knowing what is needed and being able to do what is required. These results help organizations find highly effective ways of "positively-infecting" organizations with new ideas and behavioral norms to remove interferences and stretch the potential.
Start with data. With the expertise gained from using a consistent management design philosophy, we know that changing a firm's culture can be compared to 'eating soup with chop sticks': a lot of action but not a lot of results! Our diagnostics enable executives to understand very specifically the ('acu)pressure points' of their culture that include the soft issues such as vision and mission.
Productive energy is innovation
Insights into culture. Culture is located at the top corner of the Performance Triangle. Culture of the organization creates shared context, enables or inhibits knowledge exchange, and defines the boundaries of collaboration. A vibrant culture establishes shared context as the common ground with a shared agenda, language, thought models, relationships, and purpose. Shared context is all about a shared mind set, the behavior of individuals based on common thinking and shared norms. The organizational culture becomes the invisible force that, like gravity, shapes all interactions within the universe that the organization exists in. A people-centric culture is the foundation for high client-orientation.
Invest in attention and time to release productive energy
Remove cultural barriers. With ten years' experience working with clients from a variety of industries and life cycle stages on challenging projects, we recommend that in agile organizations, culture needs a different design. When culture is toxic, creativity is on hold, values conflict with reality, cynics dominate, decisions and accountabilities return to the sender, egoism stalls collaboration, and power rather purpose prevails. A vibrant culture helps to release productive energy. But energy is a resource that needs refuelling when it reaches a critical level. This is why culture needs attention and time spent on it, if it is to help people to fully use their potential, apply their creativity, and move in the same direction once decisions are made.
Since 2002, we create twins of organizations with the AI-based operating system for dynamic leadership.
Management Insights is an independent and privately owned company with headquarters in Zuoz, Switzerland.
For more information, contact Lukas Michel, founder and author, or our partners across the world.
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