The Performance Culture

CHAPTER 11Putting It All Together

When effective culture just looks like high performance.

We’ve been on quite the journey together. We’ve worked through the high-level concepts and the lower-level logistics that embed effective activities as an essential component of great performance in organizations.

It’s a good time to come back to the beginning, where we started our journey.

We began with the recognition that in far too many companies, and perhaps in yours, work isn’t working. In an effort to understand and appreciate differences and similarities, we are now tripping up over terminology and points of view that often distract us from core aspects of work. We struggle to come together and harness our differences to deliver outstanding results, because we aren’t clear about the behaviors and collaboration that allow us to do our best work. It’s not just workplace distractions getting in the way, however. There are so many interests from outside the office begging to be addressed, through our inboxes, social media feeds, text messages, and TV broadcasts. Yet we must accept that even though we are thoughtful and concerned people, and creating some degree of separation can be challenging, it is imperative. We must ask what aspects of our lives are truly necessary to bring to work.

Too much of the conversation around workplace culture has said that if any part of us is held back, then we’re not being true to ourselves. And yet the counter to that argument is that we are all ...