High Performance Culture

To further complicate matters, many companies see FM as a commodity function that is driven purely by price, leading them to outsource the function entirely. For contracted FM providers, it is difficult to differentiate the service offering and demonstrate the value that can be created through service delivery excellence.

So, how would an FM leader go about creating a team that can outperform and show its customers (internal or external) that greater value can be extracted over and above the blunt instrument of cost reductions?

The illusion of risk transfer

The first barrier to overcome with customers is the illusion of risk transfer. When a supplier is engaged to provide FM services, many customers believe that they have effectively outsourced that risk. But nothing could be further from the truth.

It is not until something goes dramatically wrong that a customer can see the risk exposure they still hold. For example, if an FM supplier runs into financial difficulty, loses a key leader, or has a major safety incident – all of these can affect the customer as deeply as if they had chosen to manage their facilities internally.

Once a customer comes to terms with this concept, they are more likely to work with their FM provider to ensure the right outcomes are achieved rather than just arguing them down on price while saying, "not my problem."

Safety is core

A core opportunity for differentiation in the FM landscape is safety. Everyone talks a good game, but knowing that people are predictably safe when they go to work each day is something every leader should strive for. To achieve this can be incredibly complex, as suppliers are often caught between their own and their client's safety standards and procedures. The confusion created by opaque accountabilities can leave gaps big enough to drive a truck through – more paperwork and process is definitely not better.

Having a clear view to what keeps people safe, both at the process level and at the behavioral level, is difficult to achieve but richly rewarded. The cost of workplace injuries is a significant issue. According to the International Labor Organization's 2017 statistics, the total cost of workplace illnesses, injuries and deaths was almost 4 percent of global GDP, at around US$3 trillion.

Injuries come at significant financial cost to any company – and that is not to mention the psychological toll on its employees. Investing in people to improve safety performance is critical. Training them, leading them, and setting uncompromising standards of behavior and performance are essential elements of creating a safer environment.

Being serious about improving safety standards requires a serious approach to measurement. There are lag indicators that can describe a company's historical performance (lost time injury frequency rate, total recordable injury frequency rate, etc.), but something more predictive is perhaps a better guide for the underlying safety environment.

To really understand the likelihood of serious injuries, near miss incidents are an equally important measure. Understanding near misses is critical to interpreting the things that, if it were not for a measure of good luck, could well have turned up in the monthly injury statistics.

Then, there is culture. Measuring a company's culture, and how constructive or destructive it is, can be an extremely useful metric to not only see where it has been, but where it is likely to be in the future.

To measure and drive safety improvement, without wavering when people retreat to old habits ("but, we've always done it this way") takes incredible energy and unwavering commitment from leaders at every level in the company.

Drive consistency through processes

One of the key reasons that companies outsource anything is to achieve greater consistency from fit-for-purpose processes. Improving repeatability and reducing variability in service delivery produces predictable results. This can bring an incredible amount of value to the FM space.

The opportunity here for FM professionals is to ensure the highest standards in process controls are met and that the people who use these processes are held accountable for diligently following them and maintaining them when they are found wanting. There is no such thing as a perfect process, but every process needs to be good enough that little is left to imagination or interpretation.

A specialist with deep FM expertise will be able to achieve process control, reliability and efficiency. Bringing this expertise to customers in a way that they simply cannot replicate themselves is a differentiating advantage that can be easily articulated and, best of all, priced.

How does leadership help?

Leadership drives culture, and culture drives performance. Period.

If desired improvements in safety, consistency, or efficiency are not driven by company leadership, they simply will not materialize. Nothing happens unless a leader makes it happen. So, what are the critical leadership capabilities and behaviors that would make positive change possible?

1. Deliver value

First, leaders must understand the biggest value drivers for their business and pursue those with focus and energy. It is important not just to know what needs to be done to create the most value but to also stop everything else. This is a lot harder than it would appear.

Activity becomes part of the daily work routine, and people become attached to it, whether it delivers value or not. It takes a lot of dedication and commitment from a leader to identify this activity and stamp it out – it takes on a life of its own!

Setting uncompromising standards for behavior and performance is the only way leaders can build teams that can deliver value, even in the most difficult of circumstances. A specific set of personal capabilities and behaviors form the foundation for this type of leadership, which anyone can acquire with effort, over time.

2. Handle conflict

Leaders must become comfortable in any conflict situation. Negotiating out-of-scope work variations, holding people accountable for lax safety standards, or stretching high performers to go above and beyond requires a leader to remain calm and level-headed in the face of conflict. This starts with the leader's mantra – respect before popularity.

This is why building trust is so important. Provide the psychological safety that says it is OK to challenge, try something new, make a judgment call that does not pan out or make decisions within a sphere of influence without seeking approval. Once people feel that support and empowerment, good things start to happen.

One of the most liberating things to help face conflict willingly is that, if people trust and respect their leader, there is nothing that leader cannot say to them.

3. Work at the right level

Leaders must learn to work at the level they are actually paid to work at. If they spend their time micromanaging, or doing other people’s jobs when they fail to do them, they create an unsustainable workload for themselves and a culture where their people will not stretch to meet the standard that's being set. Why would they, if they know their leader will bail them out whenever they do not meet the mark?

But letting go of the technical detail can be challenging. It can feel comfortable and secure to spend time in the work of the team, and it is usually much easier than embracing the quirks of leadership work. Rolling up the sleeves to fill the gaps for a team member who is not doing their job is inordinately easier than demanding the right level of performance from that individual.

Weak leaders lower the standard to meet the performance. Strong leaders lift the performance to meet the standard. That is why only strong leaders can build truly high-performing teams and reap the rewards of superior results. It all starts with placing appropriate performance expectations on people, not over-functioning for them.

4. Master ambiguity

The ability to navigate ambiguity and turn that into certainty for people is also a core leadership capability. At the top of any company the ambiguity is extreme and almost nothing has black-and-white certainty. But on the front line where the bulk of the workforce operates, they need absolute clarity about what is required from them to be successful in their roles on any given day.

A leader's job is to turn the complexity and ambiguity of the environment into certainty for the team. This is a lot more difficult than simply sending out missives from the corner office explaining what's required. Leaders through all layers of the organization must explain how their people and team fit into the picture and how the work that they do contributes to the broader organizational purpose and objectives.

Removing ambiguity and giving people a path that they can trace to reconcile their efforts with a bigger picture result will pay back multiples of value.

Leadership is underrated

Just looking at a few of the key drivers of leadership capability demonstrates that how a leader acts makes a difference to the performance of their team and organization.

Leaders spend an inordinate amount of time and energy dealing with the hard aspects of business: negotiating, poring over the numbers, planning and strategizing and trying to make sure the business grows profitably. But while they are doing all of that, they are ignoring one of the richest sources of value.

Many organizations pay lip service to the platitude that people are their greatest asset. But without strong and effective leadership, people are doomed to become a company's most underutilized asset.