Creating the Right Culture to Develop Talent

What to Expect:

• The fundamentals of a good culture of development
• The basics of organizational culture

Assuming you've got the preconditions of your environment right, the next step is to create an optimized organizational culture. Of course, this is much easier said than done. With nearly every organization I've been a part of, the culture has been, even at the best of times, a work in progress.

Culture is especially tricky to get right. It's hard-won and easily lost, meaning it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to build and only one misstep or act of deception to tear it apart. What's more, culture is a moving target. It's constantly evolving and is best captured in the day-to-day behaviors of your team in the last 60 days. It's not a list of values you set and forget, but an ongoing, dynamic evolution of human behavior in a given context.

Organizational is a function of artifacts, values, and assumptions (Schein, 1985).

Artifacts are the built and visible aspects of your environment. It's how the building looks and feels, what people wear, and how people show up.

Values are explanations for why people do what they do. In the best situations, they're a compass or guide for behavior that tells your team how to behave and what's expected. In the worst of situations, there's a terrible mismatch between what the team says they care about and what they do.

Underlying assumptions are what I'd call norms, or what's accepted as the "way we do it around here." Often, these norms are implicit and unconscious. For example, you have norms about how your meetings are run, the way people engage, and the level of transparency and openness in your communication.

It's these second two pillars -- the values and assumptions -- that guide most of how people behave daily.

Functional Organizational Cultures

When it comes to developing talent, the best organizational cultures seem to share core values of openness, transparency, and shared ownership over the athletes' development (Larsen et al., 2020). What makes them most impactful is that the best talent developers live these daily.

Coherent, lived values

Alignment between values, goals, and daily behavior is the foundation of a healthy, high-performing culture. If people know what to expect because behavior aligns with values, it becomes much easier to know what to do and how to behave. You can take this a step further and make sure the values are comprehensive and include the appreciation of both the person and performer, which will also help to make the other facets of an optimized organizational culture more powerful.

If you don't do anything else, focus on getting this right. Put simply, people can smell BS. If the coach or leader isn't walking the walk - aligning their behaviors with what they say is important - the rest of the culture will have a ceiling on what it can achieve.

For culture to be powerful, it has to be fully aligned from values to daily actions.

Empowerment

Great organizational cultures also encourage performers to take ownership of their growth and development. In the case of environments trying to develop talent, this ownership must be transferred from leaders to front-line performers. While leadership should be there to challenge and support, performers themselves should have a strong influence in attacking what they think they need to develop. And, performers should be encouraged to make their own decisions about what they need to support that development.

Psychological safety

I'm not big on the term psychological safety - not because it's not important, but because it has a connotation that people in the environment are fragile and need to always be safe.

In reality, high-performing environments are rarely, if ever "safe." That doesn't mean it's not safe to make mistakes or improve, or that failure is unacceptable. It does mean, however, that in most high-performance environments, there are real consequences to failure - including losing your job, losing your role, or letting the team down entirely.

Terminology aside, the best environments for development do allow room for mistakes, emphasize effort over talent, and encourage progress over perfection. But, when these environments turn into performance environments, expecting this balance to be the same is a fool's errand. The stakes are higher when the lights are on.

High-quality training

Finally, the best environments for developing talent provide quality opportunities for that talent to practice, exchange ideas, and strike a good balance between challenge and support. In an ideal world, the higher-level talent will help develop the lower-level talent through competition and knowledge or experience sharing. This is part of why you see veteran Qbs training their replacements - it's part of what it means to deliver a high-quality training experience, and to lead.

If you can put these pillars in place, you have the chance to create a strong culture of development. The talent within will understand what's important, how to behave, what information to share, and how to take ownership of their progress and growth. The people will encourage and support one another while competing and challenging them to become better versions of themselves. The leaders uphold the values and hold people accountable.

Of course, executing a culture like this is challenging, and it's important to go slow and get it right rather than implement all these pillars at once if they are missing. To begin, I'd encourage getting the values and behavior alignment down pat. Everything for the rest of the culture flows from that place of alignment and integrity.

Next, we'll turn our attention to the team within the team - how support systems in an organization interact to do their best for the talent in the organization. If these teams work well together, the synergistic benefit of this collaboration significantly enhances the talents' opportunity to reach their full potential.