Ten Tactics for Creating a High-Performance Culture 

Driving Results

Now that we know it’s all about you, let’s explore what you can do to drive results.

1. Be objective about yourself. Leaders must recognize when they are triggered into exhibiting their worst selves. Take this short-form leadership profile (www.alpfree.com/arudia/) and this cultural-impact profile (www.atpfree.com/arudia/) to see how your behaviors affect your team and the broader culture. Then strategize to reduce the detrimental.  
2. Set clear goals. Tell your leaders exactly what you need, including any must-haves, applicable constraints, and timelines. Don’t forget to specify your tolerance for risk. Be open to discussing apprehensions and concerns, your own and your leaders.
3. Listen resonantly. Listening with resonance means listening deeply for understanding. Listen through the fear for the message, and register the fear as a message. Colleagues share valuable information. Listen.
4. Don’t take anything personally, really. To be at your best, to be the leader you need to be to accomplish your goals, to stay empowered in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges, you will need to amplify your objectivity in order to depersonalize complaints and criticism. The truth is that the complaints and criticism are not about you, even if they are directed at you. Instead, they embody important information and most likely fear.  Listen, learn, and lead.
5. Adopt a problem-solving mindset. A problem-solving mindset is essential to nurturing a high-performance culture in which wellbeing and retention dominate. Eschew blame in favor of solutions, learning, and growth.
6. Co-create. Work with your team to create the organization’s vision, values, strategic plan, and tactics for maintaining and improving results and culture. Be patient with the process – it takes time to do anything right.
7. Embrace cognitive diversity. Embrace differences in cognitive, thinking, or creativity style (whichever term you prefer) as the treasure they are. Differences make a team strong, but only if you proactively address the friction and misunderstandings that can result from the dissimilarities. It’s more than not requiring team members to mold themselves into a particular archetype. Actively encourage curiosity and mutual respect amongst your team by seeking out input from all, especially those who are most divergent or even quirky. Acknowledge each person’s thoughtful contribution even when not adopting it.  
8. Choose and live by trust-enhancing core values. Many organizations don’t deliberately create their core values or they do and the values are loosely or not lived. If your values happen as a consequence of structures that lead to internal competition for resources, power, and money, you’ve got a problem. If you establish structures that incentivize trust and collaboration, you create a culture in which colleagues are loyal, fulfilled, and loathe to let each other or the organization down. They perform and deliver results. They don’t waste energy on self-protective strategies.
9. Use coaching skills. Coaching is not refining a person’s swing by telling the person what to do. Coaching, in the business context, is asking colleagues open-ended questions designed to support them in doing their best thinking, transforming them into stakeholders, and engaging them as you learn and gather more information and ideas.  
10. Embrace accountability as an enviable value. People often wince when they hear the word “accountability.” But accountability is about trusting that colleagues will do what they said they would do. Once you have accountability, if the work isn’t getting done, it’s time to figure out what isn’t working and why. This is relatively easy in a culture that also embraces a problem-solving mindset.