In Australia and New Zealand, 97% of companies are small businesses, with less than 20 staff members. Furthermore, 2% are considered small to medium sized having between 20 to 200 employees. These figures are even stronger in the US where over 99% of organisations are classified as small business.

I have regularly heard small to medium sized businesses refer to their culture as being “like a family”. This description of their culture has advantages and disadvantages. A family culture typically has wonderful qualities such as kindness, compassion, caring, and nurturing. In today’s environment where there is a high level of stress, anxiety and burnout, particularly following the global pandemic, these lovely qualities are important to have.  These virtues help to drive a culture of wellbeing, which is something many people are craving today.

On the other hand, we all know that sadly many families have some dysfunctional attributes whereby some family members are ‘tolerated’ as we are meant to love our family members unconditionally regardless of their behaviours. I have come to believe that this aspect of a ‘family culture’ within the workplace is extremely unhelpful. This leads to poor performance and inappropriate behaviours being allowed to continue.  In this environment, people are not held accountable for behaviours or performance that are not aligned to the company strategy and/or the espoused company values and cultural aspirations.

So, how should we think about and describe a culture whereby there is an equal focus on the wellbeing of staff and the performance of the business?

Netflix recently came out and described what I believe is a better analogy to define the culture you want to create. That is, a high-performance sporting team. If you think of a team like the All Blacks rugby team from New Zealand, many people believe that they have been one of the highest performing sporting teams of all time, and this high performance has lasted for over a century. During this time, many team members have come and gone and yet their performance and positive culture has been maintained. If you’re interested in finding out more about the All Blacks and how they have achieved this, I would recommend you read Legacy by James Kerr. The expectations of a high-performance sporting team are that people care about each other, trust others, show compassion and support each other wholeheartedly. The best sporting teams are bound together in strong ways where they instinctively know and trust the capability of their fellow team members. They also, do not accept poor performance or behaviour and they continually strive to raise the bar and reach their combined potential. They hold each other accountable for their performance and they have the necessary tough conversations to continue to drive up the standards.

I would encourage all organisations, particular the 99% of small to medium sized companies, to reframe the words they use to define their company culture and where appropriate, consider using the ‘high performance sporting team’ analogy as a simple vehicle for changing some of the internal dialogue and expectations of all team members.

Hayden Fricke

Managing Director, Steople

 Hayden Fricke | LinkedIn