How to create a high-performance culture 

Professor Damian Hughes is an international speaker, best-selling author, and alongside Jake Humphrey, co-host of the much-loved High-Performance Podcast. An expert within the world of sport, organisational development, and change psychology, Hughes helps organisations create high-performance cultures.

In a recorded conversation with The IN Group's CEO. Nick Baxter, and the founder and CEO of Caraffi, Graeme Paxton, they explored the ways in which organisations can create a high-performing culture. We've unpacked the highlights of their fascinating 90-minute session so you can find out how high-performance cultures are created.

NICK: What does high-performance mean to you? Has it changed since you started The High-Performance Podcast?

DAMIAN: It's changed massively, yes. Like a lot of people. I had a perception of high-performance that was stereotypical: it focused on coming out on top, winning the trophies, making money, and being a champion who was lauded. What preceded that was struggle, sacrifice, hard work, late nights, early starts, and all that goes with it. High-performance back then was solely focused on outcome.

That changed when I met Phil Neville, who was the head coach for England's Lionesses. Phil and his brother, along with a few former colleagues, bought a hotel just opposite Manchester United's Old Trafford. During the pandemic, they opened it up to NHS workers who needed a place to stay for free.

I told Phil that I admired what he did. I thought it was far-sighted, generous, and kind. What he said next was one of those penny dropping moments where the true meaning of high-performance to me shifted completely. He said. "I just think you've got to do the best you can, with what you've got, in the moment you're in."

I love how that way of seeing it acknowledges three important components: one, we all start from different places; two, we've all got different resources available; and three, we're all in a different time in our lives. When I look at high-performance that way, it forces me to ask myself, "right now, wherever I am and whatever I'm doing, am I doing the best that I can? If I answer "yes" to that then it stops me falling into the trap of comparing myself to others, and telling myself that "I've got to be number one. I've got to hit a certain figure. I've got to be in a certain position." That's not helpful.

NICK: Do you think there's a fundamental difference in high-performance because it depends on what someone does, or have you noticed a consistency regardless of what people do?

DAMIAN: In over the hundred or so interviews for The High-Performance Podcast, we haven't had a single definition of what high- performance means with any consistency. That said, a brilliant example of what it means to me.

personally came from the rugby player, Jonny Wilkinson. He spoke about the struggle and the sacrifice in his career which were what he felt drove him to get to be the top of his game.

Compare that to Dan Carter, the New Zealand rugby player. Arguably, he and Wilkinson are pretty much equals in terms of their success. But they came from completely different places: Carter just played for the sheer joy of playing, whereas Wilkinson did it for the sheer fear of losing. This is a brilliant illustration that there's no right or wrong way when it comes to high-performance; only what's best for you.
So much of what we do is an amalgamation of the physical and the mental, and even what you might term the spiritual. It's simply about knowing how to bring out the best in people.

I worked with a Premiership rugby team a few years ago, who were close to collapse and in a state of crisis. How did they get there? An inconsistent team performance: when they were good, they were very good, but when they were bad, well, they were pretty bad.​

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I said, "right, let's start by looking at when you've been very good and then divide your performance into two categories - hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills we can quantify and measure. For the softer skills - including effective communication, confidence, and team spirit, etc. - these are the ones we'll find harder to measure."

 

I asked them to think about when they'd been very good, what percentage of their performance had been down to the hard stuff, and how much down to the soft stuff? Like most elite performers, they said 30% is the hard stuff, and 70% the soft stuff, because when you're playing at that level a certain level of competence is a given. So those numbers made sense. Then I asked them how much time they invested in the development of soft skills: they said very little. Why so little you might be wondering?

 

It's the same every time - soft skills are incredibly hard to measure and quantify. Now let's translate this to the business world.

 

It's rare that what you do is substantially different to your competitors, though things like price, size, or where you're located will vary of course. Think about this from a personal perspective and ask yourself why you decide to work with the people that you do? Why do you buy from one business over another? I guarantee it's mainly down to the soft stuff such as the relationships that we've forged: the way you feel listened to as a client: how much empathy you're shown; and how they relate to you on a human level. That's where a firm's competitive advantage lies because when treated like a human, you're able to cope under pressure, and these tie directly into how much effort you put into developing your soft skills.

 

GRAEME: Is high-performance something that everyone can achieve?

 

DAMIAN: It goes back to the definition of high-performance. If you start by seeing it as doing the best you can in the moment with the resources you've got, then yes, everyone can be a high-performer, because it's about you improving, not your performance compared with someone else's. Thinking about it in terms of who ends up on top, can often lead to unhealthy versions of high-performance - for anyone, doing anything.

 

I once asked Dame Kelly Holmes about how much of her success in the Olympics was down to her ability to run really fast, or her ability to run really fast under pressure. It was the latter, she replied. She explained that it wasn't all down to how hard she trained. Some of her coping skills andresilience came from dealing with personal trauma.

 

That's something important to remember: we all have mental health issues at some stage in our lives, whether it's stress, or depression. or a life-long battle with how much self-care we give ourselves. It's a scale that will vary for everyone, but something that will always impact our performance.

 

GRAEME: Do you believe that high- performers sometimes need to reverse engineer a narrative when they think about how they got to where they are because it's so hard to see at the time?

 

DAMIAN: Yes, they do, and studies about the stories we tell ourselves back this up. It's why if you interview an elite performer, you want to ask them about the traits that they consistently developed as opposed to how they achieved success in a particular season, for example. When you talk about those, you'll get closer to the real story.

 

What's always intrigued me about high- performance hasn't been seeing the wins and the bright lights that they bring, but what precedes them: the sacrifice, the dedication, the discipline, the hard work, the diligence, etc. I call all those traits and characteristics "the work in the shadows".

 

If you look at my own journey from a retrospective narrative, what I do now seems to make perfect sense. My dad founded one of those dark and gritty boxing gyms in Manchester City; it was an oasis in the middle of a concrete jungle. I grew up around guys who went on to become Olympians, boxing champions and achieve significant success. Despite having a less than easy start in life. Back then, Manchester City was Europe's third poorest district. Yet despite the social deprivation, crime, gang culture, and unemployment, I feel really blessed that I grew up there.

 

Dad's gym really was an oasis. People would show up and felt seen, heard, and respected. Why did they? It was because we all made a concerted effort to comply with certain cultural norms. One of those was there was no bad language allowed in the gym. Now this wasn't about being virtuous, or taking a moral high ground, but because discipline was one of the non-negotiable behaviours that we had to develop when training. The coaches at the gym argued that when you're faced with a tough situation, and your first response is to swear. It indicates a lack of discipline that will probably cost you somewhere down the line.

 

Another thing we did to maintain self- discipline and keep the gym feeling like an oasis was to shake hands with everyone we met as soon as we came in, as a mark of respect. It didn't matter if we were going up against each other later on, we still had to respect that self-discipline as it was part of what shaped our cultural norms. When you think about culture in that way, you start to view culture as fundamental to our societal DNA.

 

Another thing that went on to shape what I do today began in university, when I was talking to a lecturer about possible research avenues.

 

He told me that they didn't actually do research there, they did something he called "me-search". "Me-search?". I wondered. Yes, he explained, because we only make sense of things that have happened in life when we look back on them. That's why he preferred the term "me-search" to "research". From that moment, I became fascinated in the fields of organisational psychology and culture.

 

NICK: Culture has to be one of the most overused terms in business. What I prefer to talk about is high-performance and how this ties to expectations. To me, high-performance is seen in a person's attitude and work ethic. How much they care about what they do directly correlates to how willing they'll be to go that extra mile. All the time I see extremely capable people with so much potential ahead. Yet years later they've failed to realise that potential which I believe comes from not pushing hard enough or jumping high enough.

 

GRAEME: I agree, it's why at Caraffi, when we're working with clients our conversations almost always begin with culture, which is rather challenging because culture is an amalgamation of so many different factors. What we talk about instead is output, because output we can measure. Do you agree with that way of thinking about culture?

 

DAMIAN: Using the term "culture" is problematic because it's an abstraction, which I don't encourage leaders to use. This point was made loud and clear in some advisory work I did with twenty coaches from the Football Association.

 

The first thing I asked them to do was to write down how they defined culture and then share it with everyone else. Guess what came back? Twenty different definitions of culture, which perfectly demonstrates why the term is rather unhelpful to organisations and the people in them.

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What is helpful, however, is to find a common language that brings our notions of culture to life. By looking at an organisation's behaviours and traits that manifest as culture, so we reduce misunderstanding and communicate more effectively when talking about it.

 

Why exploring common language is constructive stems from organisational psychology studies in the early 1990s, carried out by Stanford University's James Baron and Michael Hannan, and published in 2002. They lectured on the ways that they believed culture could drive competitive advantage. The issue was, at the time, they had no data- driven evidence to back it up - which is less than ideal in academic research. As they were close to Silicon Valley, they got some funding to go explore and see if their ideas had legs. Their exploration continued for nearly twenty- five years.

 

Five types of organisational culture Baron and Hannan identified five types of culture. Sometimes they saw an amalgamation of two or more cultures at play, but generally these five categories crop up over and again in organisations, regardless of their size, sector, or industry.

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Star Culture

 

The first type is a star culture. These are organisations that raise a heap of VC funding and can hire the best talent, pay the highest salaries, get the plushest of offices that they fill with cool stuff. Then they sit back and wait for all that talent to come together and deliver spectacular success. One of the startups Baron and Hannan researched was Google. Whilst Google was a monumental success, the reality is that around 98% of star cultures eventually crash and burn.

 

Many years ago, I interviewed Diego Lopez, an ex-head coach of the football team, Real Madrid and spoke about star culture. When I asked him about what he found as a leader, he said it's like a restaurant kitchen: everyone wants to be the head waiter, or head chef. but no one wants to wash the dishes. This illustrates the chief flaw in star cultures.

 

Autocratic Culture

 

The second type of culture Baron and Hannan identified is an autocratic culture. This is where a CEO or founder runs the company from a "my way or the highway" way of doing things, like Steve Jobs did at Apple until he was fired by the board as a result. Autocratic leaders make flawed decisions because they become complacent or arrogant, and fall into their eventual demise, and this risks dragging the organisation down with them.

 

Bureaucratic Culture

 

The third type of culture they termed bureaucratic, and it is where an organisation makes decisions by committee. This results in rules, regulations, policies, and endless procedures that slow an organisation down. and make innovation and transformation nigh impossible.

 

Engineering Culture

 

Fourth came engineering cultures. Despite the name, these focus on people's technical expertise above all else, and don't refer to engineers or the engineering industry. These organisations recruit people because they're technically good at their job but don't place much importance on a person's behavioural traits. This fundamentally flawed way of running an organisation means people end up defending their territory, because they're the specialists and not you. The result? Sharing ideas and working creatively grind to a halt. and ultimately stagnate the company's ability to grow.

 

Commitment Culture

 

The fifth and final culture Baron and Hannan termed a commitment culture, which starts by asking. "What's our sense of purpose?" and "What are we here to achieve through our shared sense of purpose?" Organisations with this type of culture clearly define their values and identify the behaviours that underpin how they make decisions - and all of these tie directly to their sense of purpose.

 

Which culture leads to high -performance?

 

Over twenty-five years tracking organisational culture proved that commitment cultures won hands down every time - on average by around 22% when Baron and Hannon measured things like market share, speed of growth. profitability, and employee turnover.

 

Their evidence, along with years spent working in organisations and observing cultures, is why I believe what I do: high-performance cultures can only be created when there's a shared sense of purpose and measurable behaviours that demonstrate commitment. These are what empower us to overcome the challenges we face, and find what we all need individually, to reach our personal best.