High Standards Pave the Way

Is your team’s work environment engaging and inspiring or dull and frustrating?

An engaging and inspiring environment is usually active and noisy. People are moving around, talking and working together to solve problems and deliver solutions. Team members are pleasant and happy.

A dull and frustrating environment is usually passive and quiet. Team members work independently, not cooperatively. Interactions between team members are often tense and short. Noise may come from unhappy people arguing.

Your work environment may fall somewhere between these two extremes. Do you pay attention to the your workplace culture?

If you’re like most leaders, probably not. Leaders typically pay more attention to products and services than they do to their team (or department or company) culture. Yet culture drives everything that happens in their organization – and yours – good or bad.

Culture by default isn’t a reliable way to craft workplace inspiration. Culture by design is.

Leaders must pay equal attention to performance and values. Both are required to create a productive, safe, and inspiring work environment for everyone.

Great (and effective and inspiring) bosses are intentional about their team’s culture.

They set high standards of performance as well as high standards for values – team citizenship – to ensure a healthy workplace.

They specify desired performance expectations in observable, tangible, and measurable terms. With clear performance standards communicated and agreed to, great bosses are able to hold people accountable for those performance standards.

They also specify desired values standards – in the form of observable, tangible, and measurable behaviors. With clear values standards communicated and agreed to – and modeled by leaders – great bosses are able to hold people accountable for demonstrating those behaviors in every interaction.

Creating and managing to behaviorally defined values is a proven avenue to an engaging and inspiring work environment. Yet most leaders have never been asked to manage values and behaviors before! Leaders are more experienced and more comfortable with managing performance expectations. They’re much less experienced managing values expectations.

What leaders need is a step-by-step guide to creating and managing to values standards. I present exactly this approach in my new book, The Culture Engine.

Would your team or department benefit from high performance standards and high values expectations? Learn more about creating an organizational constitution and managing to one in my new book, The Culture Engine. Get your free sample chapter at http://thecultureengine.com.

Please leave your comments and questions in the comments section.