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Abstract
This article shares a very adaptable model for achieving a high-performance culture. Using specific examples, the author demonstrates how to build a high-performance culture based on four components: a collaborative environment, accountability, focus, and robust processes. Success and bottom-line results can be achieved by aligning an organization along these four factors.
It has become increasingly clear that the ability of a team or organization to create a high-performance culture is the most critical step in ensuring its ability to consistently achieve superior results. As summarized so eloquently by Lou Gerstner (2002), "I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game - it is the game... In short, businesses with highperformance cultures are winners, and no person of substance would work anywhere else" (pp. 182, 234). Conversely, the failure to develop such a culture is the path to organizational mediocrity, bankruptcy or even oblivion.
The critical question becomes, then, What is a high-performance culture, what are the key elements or ingredients necessary for creating it, and why is the creation of such an obviously advantageous culture so difficult for most teams and/or organizations to achieve?
As defined here, a high-performance culture is a "mind-set" - with accompanying and reinforcing habits, practices and routines - about how to optimally engage one's human resources in order to optimize long-term team/organizational performance. Based on over 20 years of consulting experience, and a distillation of the observations and conclusions of numerous other authors, I have reached the conclusion that there are four critical components necessary to create and sustain such a culture:
1) A collaborative environment;
2) A culture of accountability;
3) Focus; and
4) Robust processes.
Let's take a look at each, in turn, to ensure that we not only understand what is critical about each, but just as importantly, how they interact with each other to create a culture of sustainable high-performance.
Collaborative Environment
A collaborative environment is a team or organizational culture characterized by an over-riding belief in and the application of- the power of collaboration at every level. This results in an atmosphere in which all team members not only feel that their point of view and their ideas are welcomed and of value but...