Cultivating High-Performance Cultures Through Intentional Relationship Building

In high-performance, highly creative and innovative organizations, there is a resounding, consistent factor found in all of them — curiosity and investment in relationship building. They are symbiotic.

These are organizations that are unafraid to ask the difficult questions of themselves, their people, their partners and clients, and they believe in the validity of the answers they receive. Many of the most innovative, profitable and successful organizations make it a part of their everyday practice to mix things up, ensuring that people are cross-trained and well-supported, able to explore different roles within the organiza­tion and take on varied tasks.

This is not always the case in accounting and finance roles, but it should be. Success­ful leaders intentionally place employees in scenarios where a fresh perspective will empower curiosity. They leverage the tension created in not doing the same thing every day, knowing it is necessary for progress and innovation. In short, they are invested in their relationships with their people and their people’s relationships to their work, the organization and those they work with.

The Role of Curiosity

How do organizations create the kind of culture that sustains this type of tension? They start with relationship building, by rethinking projects and how people can engage together, normalizing thinking outside of the box and sparking curiosity by leveraging respectful contrary thinking.

We cannot build relationships with people we are not curious about, and we cannot sustain relationships, if we slip into the belief that knowledge and understanding are fixed and designate that which we currently know as sacrosanct. This runs contrary to doing things as they have always been done, as people are ever evolving and changing, and we should be supporting that growth and acknowledging it.

Leadership Drives Innovation

Curiosity is a sustained practice, without which we never build the relationships required to create a culture that drives innovation and profitability. I like to define innovation as a reimagining of relationships. Whether it be in recognizing a beneficial connection between factors we previously saw as disparate or how we position our­selves in the market, it’s fundamentally a reimagining of relationships.

The Process

Let’s be clear: “high-performance culture” is not code for working your people until they are burned out and looking for another job, which happens frequently in accounting. We must think more broadly in all aspects of our organizations and leverage the decades of wisdom that exist inside our walls to understand how to accomplish more of what matters, efficiently and successfully.

Leadership is about intentionally building powerful relationships with those we lead. We cannot expect people to bring their whole thriving selves and contribute to our organization’s success if we are not invested in their thriving. How can we be invested in their thriving if we do not intentionally seek to understand what that means for them personally? This investment should come from the C-suite, directors, managers and mentors.

In considering relationship building as a necessary part of empowering high-performance cultures, we also need to consider that a diverse array of perspec­tives is required. Groupthink sets in quickly when we do not build our organizations with diversity at the core. Ecosystems, towns and corporations alike collapse when we silence dissent, divest from diversity and accountability, and favor homogeneity. If we do not value dissent, we are more invested in comfort and control than in innovation and profitability, and if that way of thinking can take down Swissair and Lehman Brothers, it will take others down too.

If we are spending energy protecting our ideas and ways of doing things, it is likely that we already know they will not stand up to scrutiny, and they are already causing harm. We need to let go of leadership through constancy and control and invest in relationship building and curiosity. Watch your organization transform as you cultivate a high-performance culture through intentional relationship building driven by curiosity.