150 - How Top Companies Build Winning Cultures: Simon Taylor (Head of Organization Effectiveness, Gap)
Jan 26, 2024
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Guest Simon Taylor, Head of Organizational Effectiveness at Gap, shares insights on building a high-performance culture, the role of leaders, and commonalities among top companies. Topics include the conflation between values and culture, steps to building a high performance culture, and the three things all leaders need to do well.
Building a high-performance culture involves understanding current and future states and developing a change management plan.
Values and culture are interconnected but not the same; cultural shifts can align with an organization's values and strategy.
Effective change management requires a robust plan, top management sponsorship, and ongoing progress measurement.
Deep dives
The Ecosystem of Building a High-Performing Organization
The book focuses on providing a holistic view of the four key pillars for building and managing a high-performance organization: direction, leadership, teams, and systems. Each pillar is a critical component for success, addressing aspects such as mission, vision, values, culture, strategy, clarity, trust, climate, complementary skills, behaviors, mindsets, and various systems like hiring, structure, performance management, and continuous improvement. By exploring these pillars, leaders can identify and prioritize the areas that will drive their organization's performance.
The Journey of Writing a Book and Personal Growth
Writing the book was a challenging and often discouraging process, but it allowed the author to embark on a personal growth journey. It required becoming a different person with characteristics like resilience, patience, and sharpened focus. The process of writing the book led to personal evolution and refinement. The greatest outcome was not just the completion of the book, but the transformation the author underwent during the seven-year journey.
Understanding and Building a High-Performance Culture
Building a high-performance culture involves understanding the current state, envisioning the desired future state, and developing a strong change management plan. The book emphasizes the importance of considering direction, leadership, teams, and systems within an organization. It explains that values and culture are interconnected but not the same, and describes how cultural shifts can align with an organization's values and strategy. The author also highlights the significance of leaders' commitment, bottom-up engagement, and infusing culture throughout core processes and systems.
Observing Performance at Different Dimensions
The author shares an obsession with maximizing personal performance and explores the concept of biohacking. The belief is that by creating the right environment and stimuli, humans can optimize their bodies and minds. This aligns with the author's belief in the difference between an optimized and suboptimized human. Although the topic is tangential to the main focus of the book, it reflects the author's interest and experimentation in finding ways to enhance performance at an individual level.
The importance of change management in organizations
One of the biggest risks that companies face is not implementing effective change management. It is necessary to have a robust change management plan, sponsorship from top management, and a system to measure the progress over time.
Building high-performance cultures through evolution, not revolution
When organizations decide to change, the approach should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This means embracing the concept of continuous improvement and gradually adapting to new strategies and skill sets. The key is to create a clear plan for implementation and ensure that there is alignment between the company's goals and the behaviors of its employees.
Simon Taylor, Head of Organizational Effectiveness at Gap, joined us on The Modern People Leader.
He shared the three steps to building a high performance culture, the three things all leaders need to do really well, and the commonalities that he’s noticed among the top performing companies.
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This episode was brought to you by Leapsome. Explore their intelligent HR platform here.
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Pre-order his book Build Smart: A Blueprint for Building a High-Performing Organization
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Timestamps:
(1:55) Good news stories
(7:50) Chasing his childhood dream of moving to America
(11:29) What you do in Organizational Effectiveness
(13:12) Why we should be jealous Simon gets to work for the Gap
(14:30) Culture change is the number two priority for Global HR leaders right now
(18:43) The conflation between values and culture
(22:17) The 3 steps to building a high performance culture
(27:35) Shoring up sponsorship for culture initiatives with your leaders first
(33:30) His experience writing his first book
(35:03) Commonalities among the top performing companies
(37:52) The three things all leaders need to do really well
(49:04) How Simon identified his playbook for building a high performance organization
(50:37) The four pillars of building and managing a high performance organization
(53:46) Biohacking
(1:03:40) Rapid fire questions
(1:07:44) Build Smart: A blueprint for building a high performing organization
