Organizational leaders believe a strong organizational culture is critical to success, yet culture tends to feel like some magic force that few know how to control.
We think that it might help us to answer three essential questions:
1) How does culture drive performance?
2) What is culture worth?
3) What processes in an organization affect culture? In this article from In My Element series, we address how culture drive performance and what processes in an organization affect culture, to showcase how leaders can engineer performing youth organizational cultures — and measure their impact at grassroots level.
For more than a century, researchers tried to understand the motivators factors that influence the decision of people to work, but only in the 1980s did Edward Deci and Richard Ryan succeed to categorize the six main reasons why people work: play, purpose, potential, emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia. Yes, let’s read them again and identify the activators and the inhibitors from the list above.
We will explore and focus our attention on the activators: PLAY – PURPOSE – POTENTIAL
- Play is when you are motivated by the work itself. You work because you enjoy it. A trainer and youth worker at play enjoys the core activities of training and facilitating — creating curriculums, planning activities for young people, solving how to break through to each young people. Play is our learning instinct, and it’s tied to curiosity, experimentation, and exploring challenging problems.
- The purpose is when the direct outcome of the work fits your identity. You work because you value the work’s impact. For example, a youth worker driven by purpose values or identifies with the goal of empowering and contributing to the personal and professional growth of teenagers and young people.
- Potential is when the outcome of the work benefits your identity. In other words, the work enhances your potential. For example, a youth worker with potential may be doing his job because he eventually wants to become a designer of learning and development activities.
How could we define a high-performing culture and understand if our youth organisation has one? First, we look at the definition of culture – „Culture is the set of processes in an organization that affects the total motivation of its people. In a high-performing culture, those processes maximize total motivation.”
While we tend to think that leadership matters most to motivation, other processes can have an even bigger impact. For instance, how a role is designed can swing total motivation is important, as well as to offer to the team the free time and resources to develop new ideas. The next most sensitive element is the identity of an organization, which includes its mission and behavioural code. Is vital as well that the people making decisions can see how their work makes a difference.
It’s clear that culture is the operating system of an organization. Leaders of youth organizations can build and maintain a high-performing culture by teaching the managers of their department to lead in highly motivating ways such as:
- Holding a reflection huddle with your team once a week, considering the following questions: 1) Play: What did I learn this week? 2) Purpose: What impact did I have this week? And 3) Potential: What do I want to learn next week?
- Explaining the why behind the work of your team.
- Considering how you’ve designed your team’s roles. Does everyone have a space to play? Think about where people should be free to experiment and make that clear. Then ask if everyone has the opportunity to witness the impact of their work, and think about what might help them build a stronger purpose. Finally, find out where each team member would like to be in two years — and come up with a plan to help them reach their potential.
A great culture is not easy to build, yet with careful planning and strategic thinking, leaders can treat culture building as an engineering discipline, not a magical one.
