Home About Us Is This You? What We Do Shop Downloads Resources Contact Us

HIGH GROWTH CHALLENGE: A HEALTHY CULTURE DELIVERS BETTER BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

Business performance and culture have always been linked, although its tended to be anecdotal evidence rather than hard statistics. I myself as part of our High Growth Programme spend some time on the importance of understanding your culture and analysing if it is suitable and desirable for your business going forward. I wrote about these issues on using culture as a support to high growth and culture as a weapon for competitive advantage. Whilst there is little doubt the having the right culture is an important factor in improving your business performance it remains an area that most smaller business owners tend to avoid. It is fair to say that much of this is because business advice and support tends to look at the process driven solutions for business rather than addressing the more difficult area of people, their values and motivations.

It has always been my contention that getting your organisational culture right will improve your competitive performance and support a company's high growth aspirations because they empower people to be courageous and offer solutions and challenge norms without fear of reprisals or blame.

Culture and Financial Performance - Managing High Growth

Up until now there has not been any hard numbers to support this view. However last June an article was published in McKinseys Quarterly which had actually put numbers to the importance of culture in business performance. As can be seen in the diagram above business performance addressing change plus a healthy culture outperformed poor cultures by as much as 2.2x. This is I expect the first of many such studies as the recognition that culture plays an important part in supporting a company's success becomes a topic at the centre of a CEO's radar.