New Eras Need a New Culture – Part 2

New Eras Need a New Culture – Part 2

Performance Cultures

For the last 100 years the most dominant organizational culture has been the performance culture. As the name implies, performance cultures are built around performance - completing tasks and achieving goals. This applies to the organization as a whole and each person in the organization. Every period of measurement, whether it is a day, week, month, or quarter, is a race to the finish line. In this environment, if people complete their tasks and achieved their goals, leaders are happy and don’t really expect more.

Authority-Based Performance Cultures

Initially, performance cultures were authority based as we saw in the era of Centralized Leadership. The leader was “the boss,” and their role was to manage people to ensure that they completed their tasks and hit their goals. Building relationships between leaders and their employees was discouraged because the two should stay separate. The task of the leader was to “get people to do their job.” The task of the people was to do those jobs. As you might guess, authority-based performance cultures produced obedience and compliance.

The goal of this era was efficiency. This is why “time studies” were so popular in this era. Could the person do the tasks correctly within the defined time requirements? That’s what efficiency was all about. While production was important, it was less of an issue in this era than it would become in the era of Shared Leadership.  The job of the employee was to “do.” Thinking was the responsibility of the leader, and innovation was the responsibility of the research & development department.

Collaborative Performance Cultures

In the Shared Power era a new version of the Performance Culture emerged – The Collaborative Performance Culture. Improving quality and productivity were the goals of this era, and the team culture was a perfect fit to do this. The expectations for everyone began to change. Collaboration within teams and between departments became the norm. “Just do your job” was replaced with “collaborate and problem solve together.” The Quality Movement became an important part of the workplace in this era. People were now expected to think, collaborate, and solve problems together. This combination of the team culture and the quality movement created a new phrase in the workplace dictionary -  continuous improvement. It wasn’t enough to just complete tasks and hit goals anymore. The key was continuous improvement. Leaders were now expected to both manage and motivate people, which required building a working relationship with their team members and learning how to coach individuals and teams. All these shifts were a welcome change in the workplace. Quality and performance naturally began to rise.

Decade 1 of The New Millennium

The first decade of the 21^st century was a time of transition from the performance cultures of the past 50 years to something different. Globalization and the presence of start-ups in almost every industry created increased competition and new innovations. The world was changing exponentially fast, and speed to market was clearly a priority everywhere. From a leadership perspective there was less conversation about managing people and much more conversation about motivating people.

In this decade the entrepreneur was seen as the consummate leader - taking risks, breaking new ground, and stretching the limits of what is possible. Startups and entrepreneurs also brought something else to the workplace – full obsession with work.

Entrepreneurs are by nature self-driven. They’ve put everything on the line to create something new. The unspoken assumption was (and often still is) that everyone else should also be self-driven. The information is available for everyone. The team member’s job was to go get it. The combination of these factors created within organizations the unspoken mindset that drove the first decade of the 21^st century – pedal faster, full devotion to work, and develop yourself.

We also learned a lot about leadership in a rapidly changing world. This decade taught us that pedaling faster is not a sustainable model for individuals, teams, and organizational long-term success. There always comes a point when you can’t pedal fast enough to keep up. It also led to the backlash we see in many people entering the workforce today – “I want a life that is bigger than my job. I don’t want to work 14-hour days six days a week. I need some work/life balance.”

It also taught us that creating thinkers, adapters, and innovators (what we need today) is nearly impossible using a managing and motivating model. Managing people creates doers not thinkers, adapters, and innovators. Spending time trying to motivate others also does not build thinkers, adapters, and innovators, because leaders are assuming responsibility for the very thing they want everyone on your team to do – manage and motivate themselves.

In Part 3, we will explore a better option for a rapidly changing world.