WE ARE CULTURE PLAYBOOK PARTNERS
We teach companies how to take the People Path to Profit
The most effective way to increase your company’s profit and overall growth potential is to get more out of your most valuable asset: your people.
How do you take the people path to profit? By understanding the intersection of culture (is this the right place for me?) and performance (what are we trying to achieve?). This juncture is where you build the foundation for a people-focused business strategy that aligns your workforce with clarity and purpose, creates a sense of belonging, and measurably increases performance.
If your company is looking for a real return on your cultural investment, it’s time to take the people path to profit.
Companies are faced with so many challenges,
where do you start?
Whether you’re trying to improve operating margins, cash flow, labor shortages, customer experience, productivity, retention, sales – or maybe all of the above – the answer to solving all of these challenges starts with having a business-focused people strategy. In other words, making sure your culture has a measurable impact on business outcomes.
Why have companies struggled to do this in the past?
1.
People are hard to manage. Human beings are highly irrational, which makes managing them difficult. It becomes easier to accept people/payroll as more of an expense than an asset.
2.
Human Resources has been delegated as the keepers of company culture. This often results in “culture” being a set of activities that are not directly tied to business outcomes.
Sound familiar? There is a better way.
The Culture Challenge
Regardless of whether you are an executive or a manager, or if you work in operations, sales, finance, technology or human resources, you should see culture as a business driver of performance. Simply put, if you need people to achieve your goals, you should care about culture.
We get it. The term culture is seen as soft, touchy-feely, hard to measure. Because of this, it is highly misunderstood, but companies that leverage culture as a business driver are consistently outperforming their peers and are more effective in weathering economic storms.
Your company culture defines how work gets done in your organization. It is the focus, support, alignment and energy of a group of people working together to achieve a goal. A highly effective culture creates the connection employees yearn for, as well as the focus and sense of accountability to move the organization forward in a way that inspires both employees and customers.
Traditional views and approaches to culture have many pitfalls that should be avoided.
Pitfalls to avoid:
Focusing on activities over outcomes
Sadly, this is where we see a lot of wasted effort and resources despite having strong positive intent. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives are a great example. Companies have spent $19 billion annually on DE&I training, but they have not moved the needle. In fact, in many ways, we simply perpetuate polarization and disengagement. Companies seeing DE&I as a driver of innovation (an outcome of new clients, revenue, etc) are seeing much more success than companies spending money simply on training (an activity).
Addressing the focus as a people challenge versus a business challenge
Let’s face it, we only have so much time in the day and leaders need to chose between what they feel is urgent versus important. In doing so, people challenges tend to fall down the priority list and so often get delegated back to Human Resources. Addressing culture as a business challenge creates the right mindset and forces leaders to recognize how their own behaviors can be the turning point to significant improvement in productivity.
Protecting how we’ve always done it.
It’s cliché to say change is hard…especially behavior change. We need to recognize our traditional way of working (Monday-Friday 8-5) was developed in the Industrial era to maximize production. Peter Drucker (1909-2005) is one of the most widely known and influential thinkers on management. In the 1950’s, he revolutionized the approach to business management suggesting that successful leaders should put people and ethics first before focusing on profits, rigid rules and work structures. What a concept! I wonder what Mr. Drucker would have thought about today’s work environment with modern mobile connectivity and the tools that exist today. We need to focus more on creating a modern way of working versus protecting the way we’ve always done it.
Not slowing down to listen.
Leaders are paid to make decisions and set direction, but so often they miss massive opportunities simply because they don’t slow down enough to listen and learn. Creating a performance driven culture requires everyone working together for a common good. That cannot be achieved without leaders taking the first step to prioritize listening to everyone around them (both employees and customers).
Our Approach
Everything we do connects culture to business performance, and we work to simplify the complicated in order to create focus and impact.
Step 1: Understanding where you are today to identify the best way to accelerate impact
Our approach starts with understanding where you are related to culture and performance. The 2×2 matrix below is a great place to start. Where would you place your organization? Do you think leaders in your organization would agree? What about employees?
We feel so strongly about the impact of this conversation, we’re giving it away for free. Download a free toolkit, including the 2×2 matrix, a suggested meeting agenda and tips to maximize everyone’s insights and perspective. Start your journey today!
We have additional tools that help us understand current state. This includes a research-based assessment (the C-3 Assessment) to ensure we validate our perspective with all employees. This creates a clear baseline, and it enables us to identify key strengths to leverage, gaps to address and opportunities to accelerate impact.
Step 2: Customize a roadmap leveraging proven best practices
Once we have a clear understanding of your current state, we build a custom roadmap aligned to proven best practices focused in three key areas:
- Mobilizing people to meet the most important metrics
- Aligning leadership habits to inspire and manage teams effectively
- Modernizing Human Resources and operational practices that drive engagement and accelerate performance
- To learn more, check out the sections Organization Synergy, Leadership Habits and People Practices
Organization Synergy
This is about aligning every employee to a manifesto that creates transparency, clarity, inspiration and accountability. Creating synergy is about leverage multiple components to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of the individual parts. Our approach to building a manifesto does just that.
Leadership Habits
Most people will say they’ve worked for more poor leaders than good ones. The same people say the very best leader helped them achieve outcomes they may not have thought was even possible. Our approach to creating self-awareness and productive habits helps leaders get the most out of their teams.
People Practices
We ensure HR practices are built to maximize emotional connection to the company at the most important moments of an employee’s career. We have an employee experience model that will improve employee engagement and accelerate their impact on business outcomes.
Wei-Li Chong
Pronounced WAY-LEE
“As a leader, your fundamental job is to create the conditions for others to excel. The challenges we face everyday are a test of our commitment to create conditions that inspire excellence.”
We have the Experience to Help
Culture Playbook Partners (CPP) was founded by Wei-Li Chong whose experience sits at a rather unusual intersection of Human Resources and having P&L accountability. He has a unique operational perspective on how to use culture as a business lever to drive performance and achieve exponential growth.
Wei-Li’s passion to support businesses in a non-traditional way is fueled by his experience both as a CHRO and as an operational leader and brand president. He has led multiple successful cultural transformations in large, multi-unit organizations. One such transformation dealt with a company coming off 14 quarters of decline with an employee and customer base in the bottom quartile of Gallup’s engagement database. Rising from an HR leadership role to serve as President of the company, Wei-Li steered a cultural transformation that led to 25+ quarters of growth and sold the company in three years with an added $1 billion in value. During this time, employee and customer engagement moved from the bottom quartile to the top and was recognized by Gallup with their Great Workplace Award for multiple consecutive years.
Prior to launching CPP, Wei-Li was president of MindGym (Americas), a global behavior-change organization focused on leveraging behavioral science, psychology and research to help many of the Fortune 100, including Microsoft, Nike, Starbucks and Coca-Cola. He is a subject matter expert in all areas of building high performance cultures and has been a keynote speaker for McKesson, Moody’s, Comerica Bank, John Hopkins University, The Milken Institute and The Gallup Organization.
Passion For Impact
Adding a billion dollars in value to a struggling company is no easy feat. Neither is moving employee and customer engagement from the bottom quartile of an external database to the top. I’ve had the privilege to work with incredible people that have a common interest to achieve great business outcomes by creating the best conditions for people to thrive.
If you have interest in seeing case studies or to learn more about how your organization can take the People Path to Profit, I look forward to spending time with you!
