STRATEGIC CLARITY

HIGH PERFORMING
CULTURES

DIFFERENTIATED
TALENT

Best Practices
White Paper

© LSA Global. All rights reserved. www.LSAGlobal.com 800.889.6452

 Top 5 High Performance Culture
Warning Signs

84%
That is the percent of people from our recent Quarterly poll that do
not know what specific actions would have the biggest impact on
helping their people to perform at their peak.

Wow. If you have direct reports, you should sit up and take notice.

Think about it. What percent of your success is dependent upon the success of others? If you
are like most savvy people leaders today, you know that the majority of your success is
dependent upon the success of the people you work with.

So, if your success as a leader is so highly tied to the success of others, why are you not putting
more emphasis on making sure that you are creating an environment for them to perform at
their peak?

Why Do Some Teams Succeed While Others Fail?

One reason is clear. With so many possible leadership actions available to significantly change
performance (e.g., new strategies, structures, processes, systems, rewards, consequences,
etc.) many people leaders just don’t know where to start.

Fortunately, our organizational alignment research has identified some key trends.

Get Aligned. Stay Aligned. 800.889.6452 1

©LSA Global. All Rights Reserved. All copyrights, trademarks, service marks and product names are copyrights, trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of LSA
Global or its Partners.
The Top 5 Performance Culture Warning Signs
If your success is dependent upon the success of others, then you should make sure that you
avoid the top five warning signs of an underperforming (or as one recent client put it an
“aggressively average”) performance culture.

1. An Ambiguous Definition of Poor Performance

This first warning sign surprises many people because it emphasizes poor performance
instead of good performance. At school, you can get an “F” for substandard
performance. On a sports team you can get cut or sit on the bench if your performance
is not up to par compared to your peers. At work, well….it depends.

The research in this area is clear. When organizations are unclear about what
constitutes sub-standard performance:

 Low performers can hide in the shadows of ambiguity

 High performers grow dissatisfied

 It takes longer to improve or “move along” low performers

 Pressure to raise (and meet) the performance expectations decreases

 Performance standards, regardless of good intentions, can be perceived as

unfair

2. Low Performers Who Do Not Improve Do Not Move

Along Quickly
The second warning sign often makes people feel uncomfortable. Firing an employee is
never easy.

While company values should be followed in conjunction with proper legal procedures,
most business leaders that we speak with are frustrated with the length of time it takes
their organization to part with low performers who are not improving.

There are a myriad of reasons that low performers stay or are allowed to stay. But the
longer you keep those who are sub-performers in the eyes of the rest of your team, the
greater the incentive for high performers to either coast or leave. The situation also
does not create the right amount of performance expectations for low performers to step-
up their game.

Think about it. If you were a high performer and had to work with a bunch of average
performers, how would you behave?

Get Aligned. Stay Aligned. 800.889.6452 2

©LSA Global. All Rights Reserved. All copyrights, trademarks, service marks and product names are copyrights, trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of LSA
Global or its Partners.
 3. People are Unclear About Whether Management Knows
Who the High and Low Performers Are
Building upon the theme of the first two warning signs, the third warning sign concerns
the perception of management’s ability (in the eyes of their employees) to fairly discern
performance.

High performing organizations have great clarity at the individual level when it comes to
identifying high and low performers. This precision is, not surprisingly, in direct
alignment with their desired business outcomes. In high performing organizations,
people know not only what performance is expected of them and how it relates to the
strategy, but they also know where they (and their peers) stand vis-à-vis those
standards.

In high performing organizations the standards of performance are transparent and

deemed to be fair, relevant, timely, accurate, and consistent by the people being
measured.

4. Too many Tactical Objectives with Little-to-no True

Accountability for Business Outcomes at the Individual
Level
This fourth high performance warning sign combines clarity with accountability. Let’s
start with clarity.

Reportedly 70% to 90% of strategic initiatives fail. While all start with good intentions,
the business landscape is littered with failed strategic plans and unsuccessful change
initiatives. From our organizational alignment research, we know that strategic clarity
accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing organizations.

Unfortunately, companies often mistakenly translate a strong strategic plan into too
many tactical objectives that have do not have an easily translatable link to critical
business priorities.

Most leadership teams come out of a strategy session excited about the plan that they
created together. Experience and research tell us, however, that there is usually a big
gap between a leadership‘s vision/strategy and actual understanding and
implementation by their teams. People need to be able to answer the question: “What
am I really here to do?” That brings us to individual accountability.

If people do not understand “what they are truly supposed to do and why,” how can we
expect them to hit stretch targets or the “big hairy audacious goals” of the strategic plan?

Get Aligned. Stay Aligned. 800.889.6452 3

©LSA Global. All Rights Reserved. All copyrights, trademarks, service marks and product names are copyrights, trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of LSA
Global or its Partners.
 5. Success-Driven Complacency
The final warning sign can occur at the business, team, and individual levels. If the
performance bar is not intelligently raised and the right level of performance
expectations are not applied, performance tends to slip.

If you want to improve performance in your organization, you should understand what it
is truly like for people to get work done on a day-to-day basis. We have found that the
way every organization thinks, behaves, and works is truly unique. For example, is your
current work culture:

 Healthy or Unhealthy?
 High Performing or Complacent?
 Internally or Externally Focused?
 Transactional or Intimate?
 Consensus-driven or Hierarchical?
 High or Low Process Variation?
 Flexible or Stable?
 Disciplined or Social?

If you have some initial ‘suspicions’ about complacency in your environment, you should
take notice. It is most likely a sign that you need to create some dissatisfaction with the
status quo and raise performance expectations to change or lift performance.

The Bottom Line

Like Lee Ross and Malcolm Gladwell, we believe external circumstances and social situations
(your workplace culture) greatly influence behavior. In “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell’s best-
selling book, he used this line of thinking as the foundation for his argument about the success
of the “broken windows” theory of policing. That theory holds that serious crimes may be
deterred by making relatively minor changes to the surrounding environment, like cracking down
on graffiti.

Are you paying attention to the warning signs and able to identify the environmental
circumstances to help your people to perform at their peak?

Get Aligned. Stay Aligned. 800.889.6452 4

©LSA Global. All Rights Reserved. All copyrights, trademarks, service marks and product names are copyrights, trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of LSA
Global or its Partners.
Founded in 1995, we are a consulting and training
firm that helps high growth companies get there by
aligning their culture and talent with strategy.
Who we work with ‐ Leaders
Our clients are typically mid‐market leaders of high‐tech, life‐sciences,
and service companies who want to avoid the culture and talent
mistakes that keep so many great strategies from becoming a reality.
They want more than what traditional consulting and training Get Toolkits
approaches can deliver. They think systemically and demand results.

What we do – 3X Alignment™
We get results by creating strategic clarity, building high performance
cultures and differentiating talent. We call this 3X Alignment™.
Operationally, we are organized in seven key practice areas: Sales,
Loyalty, Leadership, Management, Project Management, Change, and
Assessment & Measurement. Download
Articles
What we know – 3X Alignment™ Research
Highly aligned companies grow 58% faster and are 72% more
profitable while outperforming unaligned companies at these rates:
ƒ Customer Retention 2.23‐to‐1
ƒ Customer Satisfaction 3.2‐to‐1
ƒ Leadership Effectiveness 8.71‐to‐1
ƒ Employee Engagement 16.8‐to‐1 Read Client
Testimonials
Our Guarantee – Pay for Performance Results
We formally measure everything we do and tie our compensation to
quantifiable outcomes for your business. Fiercely devoted to the
success of our clients, we guarantee results.

STRATEGIC CLARITY | HIGH PERFORMING CULTURES | DIFFERENTIATED TALENT

© LSA Global. All rights reserved. www.LSAGlobal.com 800.889.6452