What limits your business to its current levels of success? What I find, both with myself and the businesses I deal with, is that this question invariably gets you closer to the heart of the matter, i.e. what are the real drag factors on your bottom line performance or that of your business? In these very challenging times, which are presenting circumstances and scenarios that have not presented before, the danger is that business owners resort to their biases and ways of the past in the anticipation that it will deliver them a different result for the future. So I often see ambitious business owners running faster and faster on the proverbial treadmill to stand still. Many business owners and their teams are being slowly worn out and words like ‘survival’ and ‘break-even is the new profit’ bizarrely get mentioned as if they are meaningful long-term outcomes. The concept of ‘survival’ in and of itself doesn’t inspire and engage us (i.e. clients, staff or stakeholders) unless we have an idea what we are surviving for. Maybe the survival of the business isn’t a good idea! Maybe the ‘life support machine’ should be turned off and the business should be allowed to cease. Death is as natural as life and as the changing of the seasons show us, death is required for life. Maybe a business reinvention is required? Maybe new people, products and markets are required? Maybe we should stop tinkering around the edges with tactical interventions and get to the heart of the matter? One of the simple truths that emerge all the time in my experience is that the ‘culture’ of a business, no matter how large or small, drives everything else. Only when you tackle culture, do you have a chance of creating an enduring high performing business that consistently gets on with making the decisions, and taking the actions, necessary for long-term success. As an Owner Manager of a very successful, well-known and award winning, SME business put it to me recently, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. This current hectic, high-pressure and fast-moving business environment often creates the illusion that we don’t have time to take a quick step back from ourselves and our business and ask the bigger questions – questions that we know we will eventually be forced to answer. We also know that if we procrastinate or get busy tinkering with tactical issues then we will eventually be forced to deal with the root cause issues which will be invariably more difficult to deal with in these circumstances. This all sounds rational but we are often far more rationalising than rational and can neatly side-step the root cause issues at the same time. Businesses are high performance only when people and behaviours are high performance. You know when you have come across a high performance culture in an organisation or team – you get it, it’s infectious. The soccer player, Teddy Sheringham was asked, after scoring goals in the FA Cup and Champions League finals in a treble winning year for Manchester United, what was the reason for his return to form which saw him also get back in his national side. He said, and I’ll paraphrase, “when you sit in a dressing room with players who only understand winning and everything in the club and all behaviours are fixed on that goal, then it inspires you and demands your best all the time”. Schien says that culture is ‘the way we do things around here’. Changing culture can be done once everyone knows and accepts that it is a worthwhile and profitable thing to do now. With that ‘knowing’ and when you tackle and improve the culture, all my experience tells me that you fundamentally improve the business – simple but not easy! Typically Enable brings individuals, teams and businesses through a process that allows them create their own high performance culture and as such high performance results. In the words of an existing client…. we brought in Enable to help create a high performance management team. Over the past year we have travelled an unpredictable, at times difficult, but ultimately rewarding, journey. The process allowed us see things as they really were, warts and all, and that was difficult for some of us to face up to – difficult to accept that our own dysfunction was unintentionally a drag on our performance. Once we got through that we were brought through a process of creating and agreeing a meaningful purpose and vision along with a clear set of values and behaviours to underpin how we wanted to do things everywhere across the business. As we set about implementing this, with Enable guiding, challenging and mentoring us, we realised we needed to restructure the business and management team, which we did swiftly and successfully and now we have a restructured business and management team driving the business forward, often having to make difficult management decisions, but doing so with a common sense of purpose. We are also designing a new ambitious business strategy which we will roll-out and which we believe will be really meaningful for clients, staff and shareholders’.