How to Build an Organisation Where Everyone Thrives
There are several reasons why culture has been overlooked in individual and organisational development.
Firstly, many do not understand it well enough to work on it. Practitioners and leaders often focus on its components and pay little attention to context and how these interconnect. A systemic approach becomes the “holy grail” of development.
So, what is culture? A simple explanation is to understand it as the behavioural personality of the organisation. In the same way that this can describe a person’s default responses to events, culture is the same for the organisation.
It describes how the organisation responds when no one is telling its people how they should respond at that point in time. That is, the organisation’s default response.
Organisational culture can embrace several features, including values, the nature of its purpose, leadership style, economic and social factors, the market, and the way that employees are motivated and engaged in contributing to the organisation.
It almost always embraces two desired features, Resilience and Positivity, which are core elements of Mental Toughness. Resilience: to be able to deal with adversity and setbacks. Positivity: to be optimistic about what lies ahead and have the self-belief to manage this.
Culture can be a deliberate thing. It describes what the organisation consciously wants to be. Or it can be a result of something that develops unconsciously because there isn’t a coherent strategic approach in place. In any case, culture is an outcome of the leadership of the organisation.
Culture will have two broad dimensions – an external dimension and an internal one. The internal one typically embraces processes (how efficiently the organisation delivers its purpose) and People.
The senior leadership of an organisation has a key responsibility to develop a culture where its people give their best effort and deliver all the other cultural features. Their resilience and positivity are important.
For the employee, this is also important – for their ability to contribute to performance as well as to be able to do this without detriment to their mental health.
For the follower, another cultural feature is important – teamworking. Collaborating to optimise everyone is a contributor to achieving a worthwhile purpose. Resilience and Positivity are just as important for teams.
Practitioners of all types as well as organisational leaders will be involved in attending to each of these areas, but not always in a coordinated or systemic way.
Each area has its unique features, which means they need a customised approach if they are to be optimised. However, they are also interconnected through a fundamentally important concept – mental toughness.
Mental toughness explains how individuals and groups respond mentally to the plethora of situations that organisations and their people face. This includes managing adversity, setbacks, failure and change, as well as optimising opportunity, challenge and developing innovation and creativity.
These are all behavioural outcomes that are also enablers that lead to the ultimate outcomes we associate with performance and wellbeing. And underpinning each is mental toughness – a core enabler.
We can summarise the connections and the interplay between them, and how the mental toughness concept can anchor a systemic approach, below.
The leadership of an organisation defines the culture it wants to achieve its purpose. If they don’t, they get what they get. Can they deliver that culture if they don’t understand how each element is influenced by the mental response of the people in the organisation? Unlikely.
As we can see here, the mental toughness concept is the “missing” ingredient that leaders can embrace to allow the organisation to flourish.
It is worth noting that the development of normative measures, MTQPlus and MTQ4Cs, brings the capability for a data-based approach to this coordinated approach. We can assess and measure what we do.
It costs nothing to know more. It could be a game-changer.
