How Profitability & Culture Are Interdependent

Profitability comes from what we achieve, and culture is how we work together to achieve it. Two very successful CEOs I’ve worked with answered this question the same way, “What’s most important to your business success, culture or profitability?” They said, “Culture is most important, but you need to be profitable to have a great culture.” So, if your products & services provide great value, you also need strong leaders at all levels to weave a healthy culture into your financial goals to achieve enduring success.

Culture boils down to how your people come to work each day. People’s mindset, behavior, and actions literally create your financial performance. Most organizations have four types of people impacting both your culture and profitability:

1. Disengaged: Gallop recently reported that almost 1 out of 3 employees are actively disengaged in the average organization. These people are not a good match, checked out, or complainers going through the motions.
2. Those Focused on Doing the Work: these people are engaged and care about doing a good job. They are content with the status quo for themselves and the organization but consider training and improvement programs a waste of time.
3. Those Who Are Learning to Bring the Best Out of Themselves: these people readily engage in learning new skills and consistently produce the outcomes that help your company thrive. They value excellence and are very coachable.
4. Those Bringing the Best Out of Themselves to Bring the Best Out of Others: these are your leaders regardless of hierarchical position. They passionately engage in coaching, challenge others to perform with excellence, and discover creative solutions that support your healthy culture and profitability.

The 4 keys to immediately improving your culture and profitability are to celebrate group 4, develop group 2 into 3, and group 3 into 4, and replace your actively disengaged. You can do this best with LionHeart’s “how-to” practices that generate an invigorated mindset and more effective behavior while doing the day-to-day work. Your people will need to learn to manage stress…build trust…. negotiate clear agreements…become coachable….be accountable…. focus and build upon what’s going well…respectfully speak up about what’s not working well…provide coaching to elevate others’ performance…prevent and resolve conflict…take the initiative…and more.

Our clients say these practices are life-changing! With disciplined practice, your people will embody them as their natural style of leadership. Contact: paulw@lionhrt.com