Optimized People Development Systems Drive Better

The car is sliding sideways, the engine screaming, rear tires smoking, the front tires turned into a series of long, violent skids that change quickly and often. Everything is moving fast as the driver uses a combination of the car’s controls to keep the tire smoke boiling and keep it swinging wildly into the next turn.

This is one modern-day definition of drifting – lots of speed, lots of adrenaline. Course adjustments yield instant results. The ability to guide the speeding car effectively is a critical skill.

Steering something that moves at a snail’s pace offers a whole new set of challenges and requires unique skills for those doing the steering.

Workplace culture moves slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, and sometimes when we wish it wouldn’t. Gallup recently published an insightful article called How to Steer a Drifting Culture in which they highlighted some of the dynamics that cause this slow drift.

Alongside some great advice for managing constantly-shifting cultural influences, there is also an underlying challenge for organizations to consider how well their internal workforce development system functions as a whole. In other words, is their people development system optimized to help provide the guidance required?

The article highlights three important system requirements:

• The system must provide clear feedback.
• The PDS should be purpose-driven.
• Communication and relationships across the PDS are vital.

Information Needed

The authors suggest, “…leaders should measure the strengths and weaknesses of their one-of-a-kind culture…”

The PDS has to provide various types of information to help determine conditions. If the recruiting is strong but training is weak, culture will be negatively impacted. If retention efforts are weak, a strong onboarding process will be less successful. A robust performance management element will help bolster retention. An optimized PDS provides this data.  

Communication transmits culture. And that flow of communication starts at recruiting and continues all the way through to retention and performance management. Capturing strengths and weaknesses in this type of system can only happen when communication is open and flowing through an optimized PDS.

A poorly connected siloed PDS will be unable to read the culture properly. Continuously improving the PDS ensures that leaders are getting useful and timely feedback. 

Purpose Drives Culture

“…the best leaders consider their purpose and brand when designing their culture…”

In a recent post, I suggested that a workforce optimization system that understands its reason for being will behave differently than a system that simply aims at obviously significant goals. Taking this idea further, the Gallup article highlights the connection between purpose and brand and how employees can be motivated if they understand both.

Optimizing the PDS helps to refine the system operation so that these two important drivers are clearly embedded as team members encounter the system from beginning to end.

Clear, Continuous Communication

The authors suggest four questions helpful in determining where and how culture drift has occurred. These questions relate to:

• Subtle unseen changes that occur within the system.
• Affected perceptions of employees (and other stakeholders).
• What the PDS is promoting about the culture.
• The employee value proposition (telling the organization’s story to existing and potential team members – from the start of the conversation (recruiting) all the way through to retention).  

All of these dynamics can be difficult to ascertain. The system has to be able to understand subtle shifts and monitor things like mood and attitude. As I see it, the only way to effectively answer these questions is by having an optimized people development system operating as a system, not as five siloed areas. A system that is sharing data and having connected conversations.

Drifting cars require several system elements for control – brakes, throttle, transmission, steering – all working in concert. Steering a slowly evolving culture also requires a system that works together.

In short, if the system that organizations use to find, train, and retain people is taken for granted; if it is not subjected to continuous improvement and optimization; if its complexity is unappreciated and unaccounted for, it will struggle to guide critical adjustments over the very slow drifting cultural journey.