Your company’s secret sauce for success: OPs.
A healthy culture is key to business success. Period.
At its core, culture is made up of the consistent behaviors of your team. This is why we consider operating principles to be a company’s “secret sauce for success.” Operating principles articulate the behaviors critical for every team member to exhibit to reach your business and impact goals. They give your team well-defined directions on how to perform day-to-day work. By investing in developing OPs, you give your team the gift of clarity: with OPs, everyone knows how to act.
Strong operating principles are memorable, actionable, and observable. At Sagana Talent, we like to start them with “we” plus a verb. For example:
We communicate early and often
We ask questions rather than assume
We think for ourselves
We tap into the wisdom of our team
We make time for joy and laughter
Notice how short and sweet these OPs are (no one will remember a run-on sentence).
OPs are so powerful that recently, Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek (aka leading voices in leadership, purpose, and organizational success) mentioned them on Brene’s Dare to Lead podcast as a key thing every single company should have (yet overwhelming don’t!).
Once you develop your operating principles, they can be integrated into all your talent-related practices. For example, develop interview questions to test if candidates will fit with your OPs, share them with new joiners in the onboarding process and include them in your performance review process.
Your company’s OPs will change over time. The behaviors you need your team to exhibit when you are 25 employees are different than when you are 200 or 2000. For example, in your company’s early days, an OP might be “We see what needs to get done and we do it.” When you reach a different scale, your OP might shift to “We stick to our standard processes.”
Interested in having our Sagana team take you through a simple but insightful process to develop your organization’s OPs? Be in touch or please click here to schedule a 30-minute call with Kimberly.
