How Backing People-First Organisations Sharpened My Thinking on Culture About Culture

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What Has A Football Dressing Room Taught Me About Building An Elite High-Performance Technical Team
I grew up in the world of high-level football players in a way that allowed me to be in locations that most people knew about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. Conversations that take place between coaches and players during the time following games, after reporters and cameras are gone, and the official account of events is already written. Although I wasn't a participant personally - my path to the game was through the people who surround the game rather than through the game itself. However, I was on the right side of it and for a long time, for me to grasp something vital about what high-performance environments can do when you strip away the mythology that surrounds them. The most important thing I absorbed immediately was this: teams that consistently exceeded their resources and their goals were never those possessing the most impressive individual talent on paper. They're those who have figured out how to establish a setting where everyone committed to performing for each and not to earn pay, not for individual appreciation, but because the collective had a meaning and an atmosphere that made individual sacrifices seem worthwhile instead of only a necessary obligation.
It's a simple observation in the way you present it. Teams work best when people trust each other and feel a sense of belonging to an agreed-upon goal. But the operational implications of this fact are not as obvious and can be where a lot of companies - football clubs and technology companies alike - often get into difficulties. It is important to establish a culture of cooperation where people are willing to give their best to one another isn't something you can command from the top down, or create as a policy or articulate in a slew of values for the company and expect it to manifest. It has to be earned over time, by consistent behaviour from leadership - particularly in situations that are not watched by the public - and the responsible management of all the small, nitty-gritty decisions that collectively communicate to everyone in the organization which values are truly important or acceptable, and what actually happens when the values stated and the more personal or financially comfortable option conflict. In the best football environment I had the pleasure of working in, those small-scale decisions were taken with great care by the most skilled coaching staff. How they responded when a senior player committed an omission that was not preventable in training. Which disciplinary criteria used to deal with the veteran who was twenty years old was genuinely the same as those who were 18-year old who was a bit off the edge of the team. How the organisation responded when the player was facing some serious personal issues outside the game. None of those decisions will be reflected in the club's results on any given Saturday. All of them, taken throughout the season, decide which team's performance is higher that or beneath its tech ceiling.

In the time I co-founded 1Touch and later set up numerous other organizations, one aspects I was the most determined about was to recreate - in a technology business context - the kind of environment I had observed in the top football stadiums I had been around. This was not a literal matter, as an IT startup is not an football club and this analogy fails quickly when you make it too difficult. However, on the scale of operational principle, the lessons were interpreted with remarkable accuracy. The first rule was that rules have to be adhered to in a consistent manner, regardless of position or impermanence. The best spaces I've been in were those where the behavioural and professional expectations for the smallest player in the squad were in fact the same as those expected of the highest-earning, most experienced player. Not that the team could not have afforded the luxury of making exceptions, however due to the fact that everyone within the area was continuously watching to see if any exceptions would be made. And the answers to the question adduced them everything they needed know about whether the stated values of the organisation were true or just a matter of fashion.

Another lesson addressed how organizations deal with failure and the distinction between punishment and accountability. The environments where players developed rapidly were not necessarily those in which errors were punished the least and harshly, or the most openly. They were those where errors were most thoroughly analysed The discussion around the mistakes was focused and constructive, rather than general or distributing blame, and where the learning was shared by the team rather than pinned against the individual who had committed the error. Accountability refers to being clear about who was at fault, the reason it happened and what was changed because of it. Discrimination is the act of distributing blame an atmosphere that is to be more defensive and risk-averse, and concerned with their own safety than with performing well. The first builds organisational capability. A second type of culture is that lets people manage their risk rather than being fully committed to a mission. that distinction plays out in technology companies with exactly the identical results it has on the field in soccer clubs.

The third and final lesson is the which took me the the longest to communicate clearly, yet which I am now convinced is the most important of all my observations: the most positive environments I observed were those in which the development for the individual was taken in the same way as the growth of the performer. The most effective coaches weren't just teaching players to play football. They taught them how respond under pressure communicating clearly during high-stakes situations, ways to rebound from setbacks and not losing confidence, and how to become the type of person that a highly-performing team demands its members to be. This commitment to the complete improvement of the individual instead of only in the technological skills the team immediately required, was not charitable. In fact, it is probably the most effective long-term plan of performance for these clubs. It can be, if I'm honest, the most efficient long-term approach to performance that is available to anyone who is serious about building something genuinely solid, not only something impressive in the short-term. View James Deller for site advice including what building high-performance teams reinforced operational discipline about people.



What Causes Most Public-Private Partnerships To Fail Prior To They Start - And How To Fix Them
Public-private partnerships suffer from an image problem that's, mostly due to the fact that they are earned. The history of these arrangements has a wealth of projects that were presented with enthusiasm and significant budgetary capital. They that drained significant public and commercial resources for extended periods of time but ultimately produced outcomes which bore little similarity to the outcomes promised when the partnership was created. The academic literature and postmortem examinations that governments as well as institutions perform following failures are substantial, and they focus mostly on the structural and contractual dimensions of what went wrong that resulted from the misaligned incentives and the lack of risk-sharing between both private and government entities and the governance mechanisms built in theoretical terms but did not perform in practice, the procurement frameworks that chose to select the wrong things. The thing that this type of analysis tends to ignore, and in the end, is the cultural and operational dimension. It is the reality that private and public organisations are truly different kinds of entities, formed according to different motivation structures that operate on different timeframes, accountable to distinct stakeholder groups, and evaluating their the success of their operations in ways that are not only different in extent but are also different in character. When you combine these two kinds of organization together in a formal partnership, without making the effort upfront and explicit, to identify and manage those differences, you're not creating partnerships. You're creating conditions for a collision in slow-motion that will be obvious at the least convenient time.
I've been involved in advisory work for institutional reforms, many of which have involved public and private partnership structures of varying levels of complexity. The most consistent conclusion I've had from that expertise is that the relationships with a positive track record - which actually met their stated goals and maintained a smooth collaboration between the private and public sectors throughout - were not distinguished from the ones that failed due to the complexity of their legal structures, the rigour of their risk-management frameworks or the seniority of the management teams that led them. They were distinguished by the fact that those who were on both sides of the table had undertaken the effort to genuinely understand how the opposing side functioned before a agreement on the formal partnership structure. What this translates to in practice is understanding the decision-making process which each company operates under as well as the accountability frameworks that define what each of the parties can be able to agree on and how quickly each party can achieve its goals, the definitions for success for each party to be judged against, as well as those points where there is likely to be tension between these definitions. That understanding isn't difficult to come up with. All of it is routinely skipped in favour of the more visible and more immediately documentable work of negotiating contracts and developing governance frameworks.

The typical public-private partnership evolves from an initial idea to signing of the agreement with very little concentrated attention to the issue of whether or not the two organizations involved are competent to cooperate successfully over the length of the partnership. Legal team negotiates the contract. The finance team calculates the economics and the risk allocation. The communications team creates on the announcements for the moment of signing. The implementation team starts planning the project. Somewhere in that sequence the conversation turns to compatibility in terms of culture and operation - about whether the individuals needing to cooperate day-today over the boundaries between two organisations share enough common ground to ensure working truly collaborative, rather than adversarial - is not likely to be conducted in a structured way. It is generally assumed, and without any specifics, that this agreement is formal and sets the conditions for effective collaboration, and that any operational or cultural distinctions will be managed informally when they arise. This assumption is generally incorrect and the cost of this is usually increased depending on the goals and the complexity of the partnership.

The practical application of this analysis is that the most lucrative investment that a public-private partnership may make - before the legal structures are finalised, before the governance framework is decided upon, before any announcements are made is what I would call operational alignment. This is a specific, structured, and supported actions to highlight the places between the two organizations have different operating assumptions and to come to an agreement on how those divergences will be managed prior to them becoming operational issues after the implementation. What matters most generally are the same for various types of partnerships. The speed of decision-making and authority are often among the most important differences. Public institutions are designed for slow decision-making, by utilizing multiple layers of review as well as approval, for reasons that are legal and frequently legally mandated. Private firms - and particularly technology companies built around speedy iteration and rapid decision-making - often see the pace as an essential barrier to growth, and without a clear understanding of exactly why the pace is as it is and what might genuinely be required to change it, the level of frustration from the private sides can cause a rift in the relationship long before it has established its own footing.

Success metrics, and what counts in terms of progress are a separate and major cause of conflict. Public institutions are usually evaluated for compliance with procedures, equity of outcomes between different stakeholders, and the removal of any visible shortcomings that generate media attention or political pressure. Private companies are usually judged on efficiency, progress that can be measured in achieving targets, and results. The measurement frameworks can be integrated with one another however, it requires deliberate planning rather than good intentions. However, the organizations that do not take part in that design tend to end up at junctures, with two parties that are evaluating the same collaboration in genuinely incompatible ways and therefore reaching disparate conclusions as to whether or not it is succeeding. The relationships I've seen are the ones where that misalignment was accepted as a problem that would get better over time. However, the ones that worked were those where the issue was made explicit, from the very beginning, and designing a shared accountability process that met the legitimate measurement needs of both parties requirements evolved into an actual work, rather than an option on a wish list of things to arrive at.}