What Do Top Organizations Do To Build And Sustain A Culture Of Yes

What Do Top Organizations Do To Build And Sustain A Culture Of Yes was originally published on Ivy Exec.

Organizations achieve far more by motivating and retaining their top performers.

It should be the strategic focus of all executive leadership teams to want to identify resilient leaders who will champion a can-do attitude and lead by putting their best foot forward—no matter what. Building and sustaining a culture of yes is the key to unlocking true resilience and the agility needed to scale performance outcomes.

On March 16th, 2020, Deloitte published a guide for senior executives titled The Heart of Resilient Leadership: Responding to COVID-19, outlining five fundamental qualities that resourceful and resilient leaders display.

The authors emphasize the need for executive leaders to be genuinely curious, sincerely emphatic, and walk compassionately in sync with the needs of their employees, customers, and broader organizational ecosystems. These top-performing leaders can focus on the hard rational line of thinking to guarantee financial performance matched with the pragmatic ability to go with the flow of shifting demands with a natural tenacity to achieve.

Resilient leaders are the core of successful organizations because they understand the need to put the mission first and skillfully triage emerging crises with a steady and calm approach. 

They take decisive actions with courage and are willing to lean into the tough revisioning and auditing processes to refine and optimize results. Top executives understand how to seize control of a narrative and leverage current challenges and opportunities to deliver value to all stakeholder partners.

The leader who wants to build their business looks for ways to exchange mutual value with others and find opportunities to respond to others’ desires. To serve others in a way that will create long-term relationships that prosper both the organization and the individual. A culture of yes thrives on healthy disagreement and a feedback culture prizes honesty and improvement.

 In this article, learn how top organizations are building and sustaining a yes culture to be more competitive and successful.

Cut Through the Noise: Delivering a Culture of Innovation

Executive leaders seeking to build a yes culture understand that an organizational culture of yes encourages openness, transparency, feedback, and the ability for colleagues to engage in challenging conversations with a natural ease regularly.

The world’s most successful teams achieve greatness together by creating opportunities for people to ask the relevant questions they need to gain clarity and insight to resolve concerns and lead to swifter and more reliable decision-making:

● Highly activated and engaged employees deliver a 202% performance boost.

● 69% of employees work even harder when they receive regular acknowledgment and praise for their commitments to achieving benchmarks.

● More than 64% of organization’s find it harder to retain top-performing employees than it is to hire new staff.

● Building a dynamic culture of yes leads to a 33% increase in revenues. .

When an organizational culture limits yes, colleagues may not feel as comfortable sharing their concerns and their teams may not have the same detailed understanding of what individual members are facing without the same emphasis on open communication. Culture matters, and building and sustaining a culture of yes hinges on the ability to create a world-class experience for professionals that encourages them to excel.

Building that dynamic and engaging organizational culture should be a strategic priority and executed according to a well-considered plan. To build a highly engaged culture of yes, you want to instill values that support asking the right questions and having challenging dialogues to resolve touch issues. Communication is the glue that holds a culture together.

To build the right plan for framing your organization’s culture, consider the following questions as a jumping-off point to generate conversation and internal discussions to help define your culture plan:

What are your organization’s driving storylines?

Where are you working to achieve victories, and where do you have room to improve?

When team members show up, what are they showing up for, and what do they gain from being a part of your organization? Ideally, an organizational culture moving in sync reflects a sense of cohesion and purpose that drives innovation.

Define Your Organization’s Values

Using action words frames your organization’s core values and what these activities look like in practice. By defining values and connecting them to activity, you set the foundation to determine cohesive governance structures defining how to behave based on the shared beliefs guiding your story. 

Capture the Experience of Teams

Create snapshots of the experiences individuals and teams face. What does it feel like to be a part of the division? What is the most exciting part about working for this side of the organization? How can teams tell their stories in ways that build bridges and generate new cross-functional partnerships?

Culture is Based on Traditions

Organizational culture is framed in stories, defined in guidelines, and enjoyed in practice by teams, and it’s the traditions that reinforce those values. Creating a cohesive organizational culture means people know what to expect when they connect with the core systems driving your organization.

Instill a Culture of Accountability

By defining what is expected of individuals and teams, organizations create a culture of accountability built on systems that reflect core values. How does your organization measure success? Do you hold all teams to the same performance standards? What can your management teams do to better support a culture of accountability and transparency?

Activate the Power of Yes Culture

When your team members feel supported to do their very best work, they will lean into tough challenges.

Yes, culture revolves around the ability to solve problems and develop business in an agile and resilient way.

Activate the power of yes by encouraging your top performers and creating meaningful enrichment opportunities. 

By Ivy Exec
Ivy Exec is your dedicated career development resource.