High Performing Culture - Part Zero

What is this series about?

Endertech has grown, since 2000, from a one man army, to a team of nearly 30 individuals working together across 3 continents to deliver top quality web & software solutions to clients.

Of course this didn’t all happen by accident, and of course it wasn’t always a smooth ride. I consider myself fortunate that in my early years developing Endertech, I made enough good decisions for us to grow and profit simply on the strength of my intuition and natural abilities!

Process Over Intuition

In recent years, I’ve become much more intentional in the choices I make. I depend more on process over intuition now, and as a result, our growth has accelerated. Especially in the areas of hiring and managing people, intentionally molding culture seems to have had a major impact.

So this series is about sharing with you some of the tactics that have yielded success at Endertech, in the hope that you can benefit by applying some of these ideas to your own organization.

Behaviors Over Values

I belong to a business peer group known as “Vistage”, and that group features speakers on a regular basis. Last year a speaker named David Friedman from “High Performing Culture, LLC” gave his presentation to us and I was inspired to interpret and adopt some of his advice.

One of his core concepts is that encouraging certain *behaviors* is much more effective at creating a high performing culture compared to encouraging certain *values*.

Many organizations create “mission statements” and list their “core values”. This can be a fun and emotional experience… slogans are pasted on the walls… everyone feels good about the concepts for a while… and then the slowly fade into the background and their relevance to everyday work life becomes forgotten.

The reason this happens, is that “values” are nouns, not verbs. “Values” are concepts, not actions… and a culture is molded not so much by thoughts… as by *actions*. A company’s culture is a function of what its people *do*, consistently on a daily basis… not the slogans that are pasted on the wall.

And so, David Friedman recommends that instead of coming up with a list of core values, an organization should skip all that, and come up with a list of *Fundamental Behaviors*.

Behaviors are verbs, they are actions, they are things we do… and behaviors become habits. If an organization can articulate its unique “Fundamental Behaviors for Success”… and then find ways for these behaviors to become the daily practices of each employee… the organization will be creating a high performance culture.

The Fundamentals

So I buy into this idea… that we ought to focus on the desirable behaviors more than desirable values… and I continuously work to create Endertech’s set of Fundamental Behaviors for Success.

Every week, a different team member is assigned to write their thoughts on one of our fundamentals in our company’s group chat… and other team members are encouraged to chime in and comment.

This has created a lot of great ideas and content and keeps the team engaged weekly in thinking about what behaviors yield success in business! This series is a continuation of that to encourage even more and deeper engagement with this concept within our team, and to introduce it to you!

In the remainder of this series, I will be sharing what Endertech’s Fundamental Behaviors for Success are… along with what our team members have written about them to date. I sincerely hope you enjoy and benefit from these ideas! Feel free to reach out and comment in this series with your own thoughts on this subject.

Endertech is a Los Angeles Tech Company offering Web Development Services. Contact us for a free consultation.