SECRETS OF HIGH PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP #1 – CREATE AN ENTREPENEUR-IAL CULTURE

Why is it that the most powerful force inside every business is barely tapped or even worse mismanaged? Are you making that mistake and failing to leverage an area of immense power and potential?

When tracking and analyzing the success of thousands of leaders and their employees in our programs, we kept asking ourselves what allowed one company to be so much more successful and achieve jaw-dropping performance much faster than others. Even if a business didn’t offer superior products or services.  

The “aha” our clients discovered was quite counter to what they were being taught, told, or sold to be or do to be highly successful.  In many cases, the current business success rage was the exact thing creating underperformance. In other cases, the tickle your ears, new but flawed business “fads” being followed were creating fast failure.

If you want to achieve optimized performance for your start up or multi-national as fast as possible, where should or could you start?  Most coaches, trainers, mentors would tell you to start with your people. Not even close. You must start with the most powerful and potentially potent force inside every business. That area is your company culture. 

Company culture, your values, philosophies, and beliefs, is the most dominant force inside every business. Repeat. It is the MOST powerful area of influence. Yet few leaders really understand it and most leaders don’t leverage it properly. Your company culture is how every decision is made and how every resource is deployed. What is more powerful than that?

If you’re serious about achieving highest level results, make sure you and your team read this article so that you can transform your culture in the smartest way to achieve success much faster while using less time, money, and resources to do it.

What is the mistake that low-performance leaders make?

One of the biggest mistakes we see in our work transforming companies to achieve and sustain high performance is how culture is not used or leveraged properly to optimize results. Even sadder is the fact that how harnessing the power of the right philosophies, beliefs, and values for a firm hyper-accelerates profitable growth – and it’s free. Imagine your business producing two to 20 times more sales, revenue, or profits, and not spending another dollar or hiring any more people to do it.

Write down the answers to this quiz:

What is your company culture?

How would you define it?

What is an example of how it directly creates sustainable maximum performance?

Was that test easy or difficult? Most leaders of small and large companies aren’t clear on answering those three questions. It’s not their fault, as the word “culture” is so misunderstood. 

What do you find if you research the phrase “company culture”? You will probably read or hear terms or concepts such as “values, goals, attitudes, activities that characterize an organization, etc.” Or, more colloquially, “how you do what you do in the workplace” is nice and catchy, but not transformational.   

The newer words to describe company cultures are “inclusive, diverse, flexible, fast-paced, collaborative, stiff (corporate), and agile, etc.”

These words capture how a culture is, but do NOT directly link to maximum achievement.

What is the impact of the failing to utilize the power of culture

The impact of not tapping the potential of a company’s culture is damaging to a business in many ways, such as:

• Preventing competitive advantage;
• Suboptimizing performance at all levels;
• Wasting resources, time, and money;
• Not attracting top talent or retaining the best of the best;
• Eroding brand.

How have leaders tried to fix the mistake of culture not being properly created

Many leaders have been so caught up trying to keep up with cultural fads and trends they are spinning in exhaustion because these changes aren’t improving performance. Leaders are burning untold hours and endless meetings trying to create and maintain these different types of cultures:

• Casual work environment;
• Politically correct workforce;
• Customer/client is always right (aka, customer-focused, client-centric);
• Hybrid workplace environment;
• Non-political workplace (safe places).

What’s next – a recession-proof workplace, an inflation-adjusted workplace, a generationally-sensitive workplace, a “you name it” kind of work environment? When will it ever stop? It won’t. There will always be other types of cultural initiatives right around the corner. That’s great for coaches and consultants but terrible for leaders struggling with so many other issues, like maximizing performance with fewer workers and smaller budgets.

What are high-performance leaders doing to use culture as a competitive weapon

The first thing is to realize that your culture needs to be sensitive and flexible to the changes in society and community’s norms and social mores. Your culture must include intelligent design and effective management.

Second – and this is what is so exciting because it remains a differentiating “secret” that few companies are doing – that’s because the large companies are scared of it, and the small companies don’t understand it.

What is this culturally little known or used strategy that is allowing our clients to dominate their markets, attract and retain top talent, and generate higher levels of profitability – quickly and cheaply?

It’s creating a company culture that rewards and recognizes

“entrepreneur-ial” behavior.

The term and concept of “entrepreneurial” is a unique derivative of the root word entrepreneur, but it has a radically different meaning and far broader application by adding the “ial”. And that’s why it is so confusing for most and misinterpreted by others.

MUST KNOW THE DIFFERENCE: The word “entrepreneur” is a title, moniker, or badge. The concept of “entrepreneurship” is the process, steps, and methods of starting and growing businesses for profit. 

However, “entrepreneur-ial” is a certain way that leaders AND employees think, speak, and act to compete and win consistently.   

“Being entrepreneurial” means you have created a culture that rewards, recognizes, and reinforces people at all levels who are, for example, complex problem solvers, innovative, aspirational (in their current role or for a new role), and are continuous learners (personal development and personal transformation). This type of culture will attract the best talent from all generations and allow them to work together.

In addition to maximizing talent and teams (see Chapter 15 of Entrepreneur to Millionaire), this approach has proven to produce sustainable, “optimized” organizational performance – the greatest results using the fewest resources.

This “Aha!” discovery was so critical it became the foundational premise of the book Entrepreneur to Millionaire: How to Build a Highly Profitable Faster Growth Company. Being entrepreneurial is what created the “will” for leaders and teams to accept counterintuitive principles and be willing to do things radically different than what they had been taught or followed in the past.

KEY LEARNING POINT

If faster and higher levels of performance are critical to your business, then your company culture can and must be one of the most important areas that you, as leaders or employees, must work to transform and leverage. A powerful company culture can offer that competitive edge to help you dominate and own your marketplace with less effort.

However, too many leaders are either complacent about their culture or over-invest in cultural trends and fads, trying to be all things to all workers. Don’t do either.

Unlike thinking or being like an entrepreneur and starting companies for profit, “being entrepreneur-ial” takes the best attributes of the entrepreneur root word “enterprising” and embeds that powerful thinking into your company. Imagine how great your business could be if every employee is more resourceful, aspirational, innovative, and enterprising.

That is why creating an “entrepreneurial” culture is so important and doing it before your competitors do.   

Action and urgency

1. Create an initiative to develop an “entrepreneurial” culture in your company.
2. Become educated on the concept of “being entrepreneurial.” We offer dozens of articles, videos, webinars, workshops, and programs, etc., explaining this powerful concept and how to use it to crush your competition.
3. Remember, you are not trying to create an “entrepreneur” type culture but an “entrepreneur-ial” one.
4. Have your team read the book (or listen to audio version) Entrepreneur to Millionaire (especially Chapter 1: New Will Different Way) to understand what “being entrepreneurial” means as the “Will” and then the chapters of the book that explain the roadmap – the “Way”
5. Sign up for our eLearning program. The first Module is all about “being entrepreneurial” with about 14 different topics and tests.
6. Join a small E2M group to quickly learn and implement this thinking and methodology or contact us for direct support to help transform your culture to attain your highest levels of performance immediately.