[GROWTH SEGMENT] High Performance, Low Culture: Can Companies Really Thrive Without Both?

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I got to call something out here.

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I know for me personally, I can have blinders on sometimes.

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You've ever heard the saying, you know, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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I've gotten in that mindset before where it's like everything is, you know, about leadership and competencies and clarity and all those things.

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And if I take it a step too far, I'll convince myself that if a company wants to be successful, then they have to do those things.

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They won't be successful.

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But every now and then I'll go fly somewhere to a company or I'll go visit somewhere.

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And I see that they're having tremendous success from the outside.

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So I just assume that they have the culture straight and everything is, you know, just roses and sunshine.

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And then I get inside and I'm like, whoa.

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There's a lot going on here.

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I'm curious, just in your experience, you've experienced so much.

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Have you ever seen a company that was thriving, but maybe didn't have all the things in place that we're talking about from a leadership or a culture standpoint?

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Yeah, I mean, there's an example that comes to mind.

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There was a company I worked for several years ago, number one in their industry, you know, the gold star of, you know, from a revenue standpoint, both, you know, within the United States and internationally.

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And so going into that company, to your point, when I got hired to come in there and really can help build out the talent strategy, I thought, wow, these guys probably already have it all figured out, right?

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They're just thriving as an organization.

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S&P 100 company, so wildly respected.

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And so when I walked in and really kind of started seeking to understand and meeting with people and getting a sense of the culture, what I'd found is the culture really wasn't that great.

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Organizationally, it was probably one of the best companies that I've ever worked at from an operations standpoint.

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I mean, it was a very wired, tight company that really was humming on all cylinders.

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But on the culture side, it was a culture of fear.

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It was a very difficult place to work.

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It was a high sense of accountability, which I think drove performance.

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But it was really one of those cultures where if something went wrong, it wasn't what happened, it was who did it.

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And so there was a lot of, you know, cover your, you know, CYA.

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And, you know, so it really, from an L&D perspective coming in, you know, I was always kind of...

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you know, thinking culture drives performance, right?

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A great culture really just, you know, constitutes, you know, high performance, you know, kind of old Drucker's, you know, whatever culture eats strategy for breakfast, right?

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And so I was really confused.

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The dichotomy of going, this is an amazing company operationally, probably the best place I've ever worked on how they operate, but the culture is not great.

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You know, I always kind of described it years later as great company, but maybe not a great company to work at just from the lens that I kind of looked at when I first walked in.

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And so what I had found is, you know, it was an organization that would thrive on the sense of accountability, the sense of execution.

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It overshadowed the culture because it was very clear on the expectations.

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It was very clear on the standard that they set and how they were going to operate.

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And people were held to that standard.

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And so when I take a step back and look at it, you know, years later, I think, you know, the real utopia for an amazing company is a company that can balance both.

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Yeah.

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If you can really have a culture of high performance balanced with the culture of high care, then at that point, I think you're a world-class organization that people want to work at because everybody wants to work for a successful company.

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But if you can work for a successful company that also is a culture of care and your well-being is important, then at that point, I think you're really hitting the mark.

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But I think what really astonished me was performance and high accountability and high execution is...

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can overshadow a not a great culture.

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And yeah, and I think, you know, cause if you think about it, if you have a really great culture, but no accountability and high standards, then at that point, it's a really great place to work, but probably a company that isn't really gonna thrive or reach a really high level.

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But if you have a company that has high expectation, high accountability in a culture, it can overshadow that culture that maybe isn't so great.

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And I think that's what they were kind of, that's really what they thrived on.

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They looked at it and said, wow, we're wildly successful.

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Why would we do anything different?

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Why are these things even important?

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And it took years to shift that mindset.

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And a lot of times it was giving employees voice to be able to say, no, these things do matter to us.

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We do love working here.

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We are proud to work at this company because it's a really successful company, but we want these things.

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It is important.

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And in companies like that, a lot of times they'll just overpay to keep people, right?

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Because they're like, hey, we need you.

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You're really important to the company and the output.

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So we'll just keep giving you more money to make it difficult for you to leave.

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Yeah, the golden handcuffs, as they say.

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Yeah, yeah, totally.

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Yeah.

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I want to talk about that shift.

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So in consulting, I just choose who I want to work with, right?

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So if I run into a situation where someone doesn't see the value in investing in people, I just I would just move on to the next company.

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But I'm thinking back to my sales days, taking it all the way back to when I was a sales manager.

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The hardest person for me to coach was the person who did everything wrong and still somehow got the sale.

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And so I'm thinking about, you know, talking to that executive leader who's at a company where they are clearly winning.

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They're clearly thriving, but the people are suffering.

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How do you navigate that shift?

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What are some things that, of course, over time, over years, you put into place where they can see the value of both the performance side of things, but also the people side of things?

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Yeah, it's a really good question.

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You know, I've had the fortunate opportunity to come into several different industries and Fortune 500 companies and help build out talent strategies.

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And it really comes down to tying it to the strategy that they're trying to be able to push forward.

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And, you know, you have to speak their language at the end of the day.

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You know, they have a vision.

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They're looking through a certain lens.

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They're driving to, you know, higher revenue, more market share, whatever that might be.

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And from a talent perspective, it's coming in and speaking that language and tying the talent strategy to that, you know, to that overall strategy for the company and speaking their language and showing how it works.

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these talent processes and programs and ecosystem will enable that strategy at a much higher level of where you're going and what you're trying to accomplish.

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I think where a lot of times HR practitioners miss it is they come in with HR speak.

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They lead with that.

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They lead with the academic and they're trying to show all the things they know.

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And at the end of the day,

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You know, executives don't want to hear that.

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They really don't.

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They really want to talk about what's important to them.

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It's kind of a sales job, really, to your point.

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It's coming in and selling it, but selling it to what matters to them.

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And that's where I've really seen leaders perk up and listen to be able to go, oh, OK, so what you're telling me is this is going to make us get there faster and we're going to be able to hit our marks, you know, more consistently by having the right people in the right seats with the right skills.

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Tell me more.

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And so and then at that point, you're just chipping away and you're proving it as you go.

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And the more you prove it, the more they want to listen.

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And the more they listen, the more they want.

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And, you know, a perfect example.

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I'm thinking about the company that I was just mentioning about that.

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It really wasn't built into their culture.

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And we were putting in leadership development programs, talking about, you know, building that leadership pipeline for the future.

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And it was an aging workforce was kind of what I tied it to.

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And so the very first year we rolled these programs out, it was an executive program.

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And one of the executives called me and said, how long are they going to be out of out of office?

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And what exactly are they going to be doing?

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And if I need them, I'm going to need them.

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So they're not going to be able to go to the programs.

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And I'm like, wow, this is an interesting place to start.

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But OK, here we go.

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Right.

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I had another leader call me and goes, what are they going to be doing?

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Climbing in trees.

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And I'm like, well, that's like one aspect of it.

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We're doing some high ropes, low ropes.

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But I like that's just one aspect of it.

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That was year one.

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The very next year I was getting calls and it was from the same leaders going, why can't you add more people into the programs?

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And so it went from a we're not sure we're pretty skeptical to hearing about it from leaders that were going through it saying we value this.

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This has been a great experience to them saying, well, you have 14.

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Can't you go up to 16?

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Can't you just add my two people into the program?

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And that's when we started seeing the shift.

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Yeah, you got to love moments like that where people, you're able to see it through to success and people get it.

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I think that mindset shift for a lot of practitioners, I like to think of myself as a business person who works on people problems.

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not a people person who just happens to work at a business.

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And so I think that shift is kind of what you just explained of, I understand that they have a goal, a business objective, and if I attach what I'm trying to do to that as a means to get that done, that becomes inherently more valuable to an executive leader, as opposed to let's just stick this here because this is where training belongs or this is where leadership belongs or we have to do these things because we're a company and companies should do these things.

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So I love that your mindset about that is kind of fixed on selling the ideas of it and not just expecting a seat at the table because there's supposed to be seats at the table.

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You know, sometimes you get that language from HR practitioners where they're just like, I need to have a seat at the table.

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And, you know, and you ask them why.

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They're like, well, because HR belongs at the table.

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It's like, well, that's not necessarily a good reason to have a seat at the table.

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And also it kind of implies that seats at the table are not earned.

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They're just given out.

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But they really do have to be earned.

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Well, you build that buy-in, you build programs, you build results.

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You have people the following year coming to you saying, hey, I want to be a part of that.

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That makes an executive say, I wonder what Josh thinks about this.

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Or let's get Josh in here.

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I love to get his take on that.

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So, yeah, thanks for sharing that.

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That was a really good story.