Behind every performance metric is a culture influencing the behaviors that produced it. Think about your own organization. What numbers tell you the business is doing well? Sales leaders might point to revenue, conversion rates or customer acquisition. Operations leaders may look to productivity, efficiency and quality. Those responsible for service delivery might monitor satisfaction, retention and response times. The metrics may differ across the business, but they have one thing in common: people and their behaviors sit behind the numbers.  

The sales team won’t hit its metrics if it doesn’t collaborate well. The operations team can’t achieve its goals without accountability and attention to detail. Customer experience teams will struggle if employees are not empowered to solve problems. These conditions sit at the intersection of culture and performance, and without an alignment between the two, no amount of knowledge or skill can guarantee the performance an organization expects.  

Culture Is the Classroom 

Employees are constantly learning from the environments in which they work. They learn by observing what behaviors are rewarded and which are ignored. They also watch what leaders reinforce and what their peers have learned to accept as normal. Over time, those lessons become more powerful than anything we could present in a training.  

For learning leaders, recognizing culture as a classroom means expanding the design process beyond the learning experience itself.  

• Start by diagnosing the environment. Identify cultural conditions that could support or hinder application.  

• Next, collaborate with managers, subject matter experts and other stakeholders to get a better understanding of what employees will experience when they return to work.  

• Finally, equip leaders and teams with simple tools and opportunities to reinforce desired behaviors after the formal learning ends.  

You Can’t Train Your Way Out of a Culture Problem 

Learning leaders must also be willing to ask the more fundamental question of whether training should be the solution at all. While learning and development (L&D) teams can influence performance through knowledge building, upskilling and preparing employees for new expectations, that influence has its limits.  

Training cannot fix a leader who consistently undermines company values. It cannot resolve a process that makes the desired behavior unnecessarily difficult. Finally, training will not compensate for a workplace where employees are rewarded for doing the opposite of what they were taught in the learning environment.  

Recognizing those limitations of L&D strengthens its credibility among business stakeholders. At times, our role is to design training. Other times, it is to help the organization recognize that something in the company culture needs to change. Knowing when not to train may be just as important as knowing how to design training that works.  

Creating Cultures That Drive High Performance  

If culture can influence performance, then culture cannot be left to chance. Every decision, leadership behavior, business practice and employee experience sends a signal about what matters and how work gets done. Creating a culture that drives high performance, therefore, requires alignment between what an organization says, what its leaders demonstrate and what employees experience.

High performance requires clear expectations, accountability and a commitment to results, but it also requires trust, support, wellbeing and the conditions that allow people to consistently do their best work. The culture behind high performance is one where leaders pay attention not only to the results that the business produces, but also the culture producing them.