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Here’s the process we use for helping a company to intentionally build a highperforming culture:
In the first chapter of my book, Fundamentally Different, and as I talked about in your
Vistage group, we organize everything around an 8-step framework for
“institutionalizing” a high performing culture. The steps are:
1. Define
the
behaviors
(Fundamentals) that drive
success.
2. Ritualize the practice of the
Fundamentals.
3. Select people who are the
right fit for your culture.
4. Integrate new hires into your
culture.
5. Communicate your culture by
making it visible throughout
the work environment.
6. Coach people to reinforce
your culture.
7. Lead your culture by example.
8. Drive your culture through
creating accountability.
While all of the steps are important,
and they’re all inter-related, the two
most important steps are #1 and #2 and that’s where we need to begin.
There are five parts to the initial consulting work to get you “up and running” with this:
Part 1: Define/articulate the desired behaviors:
1. We’ll meet with you and the senior leadership team for approximately 3-4
hours. We begin with an overview of the approach so that we all have context for
what we’re doing. We then spend the rest of the time working on articulating the
behaviors that are most important to you. Our facilitation elicits the ideas from
the group and we write them on flip charts. The ideas are there inside of you;
you just need someone to help articulate them.
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2. We then take home our notes from what we heard and draft an initial set of
Fundamentals (behaviors) for you. If we do our job well, the first draft should be
90% of the way there. We usually turn around the first draft within 2-3 days.
3. Following that draft, we’ll go back and forth by phone and e-mail, with you giving
us feedback and us editing until we both think it’s perfect. This usually involves
3-5 drafts.
4. When the list is perfect, we’ll lay it out in a card format and get them printed.
Part 2: Rollout
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
Next we plan a “rollout” event where we introduce this to all the employees. This
is a highly interactive, engaging event that gets people aligned, excited, and
prepared to begin practicing the Fundamentals.
The rollout takes 3 hours and we can usually do up to about 50 people in one
session. Depending on how many people we have and staying sensitive to not
unduly disrupting business operations, we’ll conduct as many rollout sessions as
is necessary. Based on our discussion, I’m assuming we’ll do sessions at the
headquarters and bring people in over 2 days.
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
As you can imagine, the quality of the rollout process has an enormous influence
on how successful the program ultimately becomes.
We’re typically onsite facilitating the rollout process.
Part 3: Rituals and eMinder



The week following the rollout, we begin taking one
Fundamental per week and focusing on it through regular
“rituals”.
Prior to the rollout we’ll discuss and determine which rituals
are most appropriate for your workforce and work
environment.
At the same time, we deploy eMinder, our proprietary
software tool, to automate the process of sustained
engagement with your weekly Fundamental.
Part 4: Deploy baseline survey



We write, administer, and report on an initial
survey of your customers, vendors, suppliers,
and employees to establish a baseline on the
degree of consistency between your
Fundamentals and your current behavior.
This baseline survey is best done immediately
following the rollout.
Regular annual surveys then give you the
hard data to track your improvement over
time.
Part 5: Follow-up training


We usually find that it’s helpful for us to come back and do a training session for
managers about 4-5 weeks post-rollout to help teach them how to be better
teachers of the new Fundamentals.
This also serves as a good chance to get feedback on what’s working well and
what isn’t and to do some coaching.
At this point, you’re up and running and really starting to see a difference. We can then
go back and work on any of the other steps in our framework based on whatever degree
of urgency you have.
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From our first meeting till we do the rollout and start practicing is usually 6-8 weeks,
depending on how fast or slow you are at getting back to us with feedback.
Cost
In terms of cost, we try to keep things pretty simple. The cost for everything described
above (exclusive of the eMinder software) is $18,200 plus any out-of-pocket expenses
(e.g., travel, printing). This assumes two days of rollouts. If additional days are
necessary, we charge $3500 per day.
The eMinder software has a one-time setup fee of $1,500, though we can reduce this to
$1,000 if we’re setting it up at the same time as we’re running the rollouts. The monthly
cost for a company of your size is $350.
The baseline survey is included in the first year consulting package and future years are
just $1200/yr. We also offer several additional a la carte tools to help you more easily
sustain your practice over the long term. These include a “coaching guide” with specific
teaching points and coaching tips for each Fundamental, an interview guide,
customized to your Fundamentals, to help you select candidates who fit your culture,
flipbooks and posters to help make your Fundamentals more visible, and an integration
guide to help you onboard new employees more effectively. We can discuss the pricing
of these items when you’re ready.
We typically spread the cost as follows:
 10% due upon commitment (at which point we’ll reserve the date)
 40% due upon the completion of the first draft of your Fundamentals
 50% due upon the completion of the rollouts
By: ___________________________________________ Date: ______________
Sample Company
By: ___________________________________________ Date: ______________
High Performing Culture, LLC
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Part 6: À-la-carte products
High Performing Culture offers a full suite of additional a la carte tools to help you more
easily sustain your practice over the long term.
These include HPC’s proprietary eMinder software, a Coaching Guide with specific
teaching points and coaching tips for each Fundamental, an Interview Guide,
customized to your Fundamentals, to help you select candidates who fit your culture,
Flipbooks and Posters to help make your Fundamentals more visible, and the HPC
Annual Survey to measure your Fundamentals’ effectiveness.
877-HPC-5050 • HighPerformingCulture.com