In order to succeed, you must first be willing to fail.
Anonymous
Culture can be understood basically as ‘how things are done around here’. While an organisation as a whole has its own culture or climate when it comes to implementing projects that matter (which we will come to in part III on organisations), each team has its own culture too.
Many teams have a culture that impedes the implementation of projects that matter. The culture may be risk-averse, so it feels dangerous to try something new. A team may be in survival mode, struggling to do the current work with no space for new projects. The culture may be political, where team members are competing with each other, rather than working together. Or the team culture may just be uninspired — just going through the motions. Any of these problems in a team will make it very difficult for them to implement new projects. Projects are challenging enough even with a strong culture, so a weak culture will make implementation almost impossible.
A high-performance culture is one that empowers the team to do the work that matters. Michael Henderson, known as the Corporate Anthropologist, a true thought leader and a good friend of mine, wrote about the three elements of a high-performance culture in a blog post entitled ‘The 3 basics of developing high performance cultures at work’ (www.culturesatwork.com/blog-michael-henderson):
In all the observations and work I’ve done with organisational culture ...
