THE LEADER’S GUIDE TO CULTURE AS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

WORKSHOP 1THE POWER OF CULTURE

LEARNING 1THE IMPACT OF CULTURE – A PERSONAL JOURNEY

Organizational culture is all about how people work together, how they interact and what they value. Culture manifests itself in people’s behaviours and what they pay attention to. The new reality is that culture – the “right” culture – can pro-vide an organization with significant competitive advantage. It is true; culture can make or break an organization.

In this learning segment, Doug Smith, a former NHL hockey player, will share the uplifting and devastating impact of cul-ture on his behaviour, performance and career.

LEARNING 2LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR A HIGH PERFORMANCE CULTURE – THE THREE INTELLIGENCES

In a world where the shelf-life of knowledge is approaching that of a banana, the path to organizational success has changed. In the Old West, they used to say that there were just two kinds of people – the quick and the dead. In the era of the knowledge economy the phrase might well be that there are just two types of organizations – the quick and the dying. The quick are embracing new ways of managing and leading while the dying are hanging on for dear life to the ways that brought them success in the past.

In the knowledge worker world, the ability of people to openly share their knowledge, to leverage each other’s insights, to create something new and wonderful on an ongoing basis, is the foundation of a high-performance culture. How people work together, how they interact, goes to the heart of what organizational culture is all about. A high performance culture, a culture that facilitates ongoing creation of new knowledge, a culture that’s about people building and creating together is today’s competitive advantage.

In this talk, Ron shares his life’s learning for how a leader can lay the foundation for a high-performance, high-energy culture.

EXERCISE 1THE ELEVATOR SPEECH - GROWING CORPORATE INTELLIGENCE

You move towards, become that, which you hold upper most in your mind. To draw on the power of this principle, manag-ers must first hold their goals and their value uppermost in their own minds before they will be able to motivate their team to do the same.

This requires that one takes the time to distill what their organization’s vision means to him or her, and make clear to oneself the message and emotions that best commu-nicates it to another. This exercise challenges participants to lay down the personal foundation that will facilitate their ability to inspire others in achieving the organization’s goals.

LEARNING 3THE DRIVERS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE – A “HOW-TO” GUIDE FOR CULTURAL CHANGE

Culture is all about people, so one would think that if you changed the people you could change the culture. But there’s a problem. You can replace 80% of your people with people who have the “right” set of behaviours and presto – you have your new culture. But here is the rub – come back in three years and you will find that, more often than not, the old culture has returned. So what is the key to successful cultural change, change that sticks and provides an ongoing return?

To get the performance culture required for success, the or-ganization needs to change those things that drive culture. So, what constitutes a winning culture and how does one go about transforming an existing culture into a winning culture? These are the questions that Ron answers in this learning segment

EXERCISE 2BEHAVIOURS FOR SUCCESS

At every turn we are forced to make choices about which path to follow to do our jobs. Our choices are made on the basis of the principles and the priorities that are important to us, i.e. our choices are shaped by our organization’s culture. Frequently, organizations are unclear about the culture that they want to define them. This leads to divergent directions and conflicting decisions.

Organizations that clarify their culture and are specific about the culture that they are working towards, become more energetic and their actions more aligned. An organization’s culture is manifested in the attitudes and behaviours of its people, its policies and its procedures – all observable phe-nomena. Thus, the best way to understand an organization’s culture is to observe rather than ask.

For this exercise, participants will be given the opportunity to be the preverbal fly-on-the-wall and from this vantage to make notes about the behaviours that typify their organiza-tion. Armed with this list of behaviours the participants will identify:

• Behaviours that are not serving the organization and the behaviours that, if grown, would accelerate the organization forward, and

• Policies, procedures and actions that are driving the un-wanted behaviours and the changes required to nurture de-sired behaviours.

LEARNING 4MEASURING CULTURAL PERFORMANCE

Measurement is key to successful change. Without mea-surement the organization is like one of those silver balls in a pinball machine – bouncing around hoping to score. Mea-

surement – the “right” measurement, keeps you focused on your change goals. Moreover, the right measurement helps the organization’s leaders, managers and team lead-ers understand their role in driving the development of a high-performance culture.

During this learning segment, workshop participants will walk through a simple, yet effective, tool for measuring how they are doing in driving culture change.

EXERCISE 3MEASURING YOUR OWN ORGANIZATION

In this exercise, participants will use the measurement tool that was explored in the previous step. Through the appli-cation of this tool, participants will gain insight as to where they need to invest time and energy in order to accelerate the development of their organization’s culture as a high-per-formance, high-energy culture.

EXERCISE 4THE FIRST STEPS

Strategy is sacrifice. Try and do everything, then you have no plan, no hope and especially no future.

Learnings are valuable only to the extent that they are trans-lated into action. In this exercise, participants will review the day’s learnings and formulate a simple, doable action plan for starting their organization’s or team’s cultural journey, which they (and the operative word is “they”) can implement upon returning to the office.

WRAP-UPAnd finally, participants will be given one more opportunity to explore the day’s experience with Doug and Ron through an open forum of questions and discussion.

RON WIENSRon Wiens passion is helping leaders build high perfor-mance cultures. Ron has devoted his career to helping organizations effect positive sustainable and bottom-line enhancing change. Over the past three decades, he has been involved in organizational transformation in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe and South Africa. Ron also works directly with the managers of these or-ganizations, taking them through a process of personal transformation enabling them to build the behaviours and competencies needed for leadership in times of rapid and ongoing change.

Ron is a noted speaker on the topic of leadership and cul-tural change and is sought out by CEOs and other senior executives as a leadership coach. His work on transfor-mation has been featured in CIO Canada and his white papers on public-private partnerships have been published in the UK’s Local Government Chronical and Outsource magazines.

His recently released book, Building Organizations that Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound, is a leader’s guide to the building of a high performance culture.

YOUR WORKSHOP LEADERS

DOUG SMITHDoug Smith is passionate about performance, recovery and the process of change. As a professional athlete and spinal cord injury survivor his story is captivating. Doug has faced some of the most severe personal, business and cultural transitions an individual can endure.

For over 2 decades he has worked to identify, organize, document and validate the 3 priorities and 8 behaviours he has used to thrive through transition and continuously drive high performance. His mission is to get this working model into your hands.

Today Doug speaks professionally to a global audience. He delivers a simple but profitable process for continu-ous improvement and helps organizations develop perfor-mance curriculum for their leaders managers, employees and/or their membership.

In his latest book called “The Trauma Code” Unlocking your Performance, Doug unveils a repeatable model for individuals, proven to cultivate adaptive capacity, resil-ience, collaboration, engagement and agility.

To see Doug’s writings visit - www.DougSmithPerformance.com

To see Ron’s writings visit - visit www.RonWiens.com