In his book, Patrick Lencioni rightfully claims:
“The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it’s ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free and available to anyone who wants it.”
Organizational health can be measured by simple but almost evasive characteristics, such as
- High organizational integrity
- No politics
- Clarity
- High morale
- High level of engagement
- Low staff turnover
Any CEO would recognize that if she had an organization exhibiting these elements her company would outperform most competitors. So how difficult it is to achieve a healthy organization? If you know the right steps to take, it’s not that difficult. It just requires a disciplined, consistent approach and hard work on things that are probably not that ‘sexy’.
If you’re wondering just how to get to a healthy organization, sign up to the blog and download the Organizational Health Decision Tree – it will take you through the entire process. If you’ve already signed up to the blog, you’ll be getting the link to access it in the next email – I’d love to hear how using it worked for you!
Now, getting to the real stuff – what makes an un-healthy organization and how has the Organizational Health Decision Tree worked for real companies?
The Un-healthy Organization
Before we start talking about how to achieve a healthy organization it’s important to first diagnose what the potential issues are. My premise for any un-healthy organization is that in almost all cases the pre-dominant cause is a leadership team that is either
- not aligned, or
- have team work issues.
To understand how ‘deep the rot’ is, I use the decision tree. It helps identify if
- it’s the collaboration in the leadership team,
- their misalignment, or
- their incapability to create an healthy organization.
How the Organizational Health Decision Tree Works
Lets go through the my Organizational Health Decision Tree with an example of a CEO that recently approached me. He identified that his company had a number of employee issues: high staff turnover, capability gap issues, low morale, line manager not addressing performance issues etc. etc. and he asked whether I could help him out. Before I dived in with possible solutions on how he could address the issues I asked him to take a step back and diagnose the situation with me.
First, I asked him that if his leadership team members were to identify the top 5 employee engagement issues, would they all name the same 5 (and their root causes)? He thought they would.
Then I asked, whether his leadership displayed healthy team dynamics (do they trust each other, do they hold each other accountable, can they disagree constructively, do they have each others back, will they give up personal benefit for the greater team good?). He told me that the team was well rounded and had displayed good team work.
So finally I did the alignment test and asked, if the leadership team was asked to identify the top 3 strategic priorities of the organization, what would be their level of alignment? He admitted that he thought it was unlikely that all members would give the same answer. And that is where the trouble lies and the Organizational Health Decision Tree kicks in.
How would you assess your organizational health? I would love for you to share examples about what your company is doing to create a ‘healthy organization’ or if you feel that it needs to be improved. I’ve uploaded the Organizational Health Decision Tree for you to use – you’ll be getting it in your inbox if you’re already part of my team.
Have a great weekend!
Photo Credit: Anders.Bachmann via Compfight cc