Gone are the days of consistency, predictability, stability, or maintaining the status quo defining organizational strength.  Instead, an organization’s very survival is dependent on its ability to embrace volatility and change in the marketplace.  Organizations that can demonstrate adaptability can survive and have some short-term success.  However, short-term success does not define an organization’s real strength.  For organizations to have long-term, sustained success, they not only need to adapt to change, they must demonstrate the ability to do more with less, respond quickly to change, and to create change.  Organizations that can do this effectively will not only survive, but thrive.  

Organizational strength is not measured by what you build, what you sell, or how you are structured.    Today, organizational strength is measured by three foundational assets – Efficiency, Speed, and Innovation, along with 12 intangible assets.  These 15 assets make up the body that covers the engine that drives companies to success. Assessment of these 15 assets  of the business provide leaders with the tools they need to make better decisions and engage the organization in more purposeful strategic planning.

In today’s first piece of a three-part series, we’ll introduce the first foundational asset – Efficiency, along with four intangible assets: Trust, Accountability, Quality, and Communication.

Efficiency

Companies that define and excel at their core business processes consistently maximize customer value and profitability. With these dual goals in mind, organizations are able to have a long-term mindset focused on sustainability that keeps customers coming back while providing a great return for all stakeholders, whether they are owners, managers, or employees.

A culture of efficiency should permeate an organization from top to bottom and all the way across.  Each individual and each team should have a mentality of being as resourceful as possible in terms of how they spend their time, how many people they utilize to complete a project, and, of course, how much money they expend to achieve results.

In order to maintain the highest levels of efficiency, organizations should be prepared to redefine their standards from time to time. Leaders must continuously encourage others to question established work processes and systems.  Companies should encourage an open-door environment where employees can challenge the current company orthodoxy, with no business practices off limits or politically untouchable. 

Trust

Organizations, by their very definition, are collections of people striving together in a unified purpose or mission.  And collections of people build their interpersonal relationships on a foundation of trust.

There are several widely held misconceptions about trust that impact organizational strength.  The first is people do not automatically trust you because you have a title or position of authority.  And the second is you can’t expect people to trust you by simply asking for it—“Trust me.” We build trust with others by demonstrating consistency between our words and our actions.  When we make realistic promises and keep them, people learn that they can count on us.  Of equal importance to keeping our word is keeping their confidence.  It’s quite natural for people to have concerns that they need to share, and they deserve respect, openness, and an ability to keep their confidence in these moments where they need reassurance or a sounding board to clear the air. 

We can’t simply rely on being trustworthy when times are good or things are easy. Many people turn constructive behaviors into destructive behaviors when they face difficult challenges or their performance is called into question.  We can’t react to these challenges or questions with anything but forthrightness and honesty. Again, earning trust is about being consistent in our principles, values and actions, no matter the situation, positive or negative.

Finally, both leaders and employees need to step forward to address difficult issues and be counted on when times are tough.  We all need to be in-tune with our behaviors consistently to what we know is right—the organization’s defined values, and, just as important, we must be courageous and disapprove of others when their behaviors aren’t aligned with the organization’s values.

Accountability

Accountability describes a mentality where we take charge of our environment and take ownership for our actions.  Basically, we need to take a combination of courage, initiative and responsibility.

People who strive for the highest levels of accountability lead courageously. They take responsibility for their own mistakes, never blaming others or making excuses. They don’t fear the consequences of taking responsibility, because they take the initiative to control their destinies.  The most accountable among us take initiative because they have a low tolerance for mediocrity. If they see something that isn’t right, they step forward to make it right.

For effective organizations, accountability is balanced throughout individual, team, and company-wide performance to achieve expected results.  These organizations keep everyone involved and informed of progress, issues, and potential problems or obstacles that will impede the company in its quest to succeed.

Accountability is also about timeliness and having a sense of urgency.  It’s not just about stepping up at the end of a project or campaign, but rather through a set of opportunities throughout the life and work of a company where people deal timely and effectively with their own performance issues.  Successful people do this because they see performance issues or mistakes as a new way to learn and grow, becoming a better individual, team, and organization as a whole with each hurdle cleared along the way.   

Quality

If we can’t say we’re striving to be the very best at what we do, we may as well pack up and go home.  Quality, as a driver of organizational effectiveness, means that we must deliver our very best products and services and strive for continuous improvement in everything we do. 

To continuously improve in the area of quality, we must identify areas of weakness that may affect organizational performance.  In order to properly identify our weaknesses, we must create an environment that actively seeks and welcomes constructive feedback regarding customer, product, or process issues. 

Strong companies create awareness of quality principles throughout their organizational footprints and talent processes. They are relentless in their evaluation and improvement of end-user valued processes in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and adaptability.  And they not only show openness to suggestions for improvement, they also don’t place limitations on what they need to do to right the ship when necessary, even if it means re-engineering entire processes from scratch to meet customer needs.

Communication

A fourth intangible asset that drives organizational strength is effective communication.  The communications within strong organizations have several hallmarks. First, companies are timely in their delivery of need-to-know information that people require both in order to do their jobs and also feel good about being a member of the organization.  Companies’ commitment to openness and timeliness thus fuels performance, motivation, and commitment among managers and team members.

Effective organizations also foster open, honest, and sincere communication practices, the kinds of behaviors that build trust and drive powerful interpersonal relationships, the key ingredients of successful teams.  These companies also recognize that being timely and forthcoming in delivering critical information, as opposed to keeping their cards close to their chests for political or power-related reasons, enables people to make more accurate decisions in their work. 

Tune in next week, as we’ll introduce a second foundational asset—Speed—and another four intangible assets that drive organizational strength.

Today’s successful, respected managers understand that developing relationships at work is critically important to their individual and team’s success.  Unfortunately, one of the attributes we see in poor performing managers is a lack of caring about their peers and direct reports and, more importantly, a streak of unconscious arrogance regarding their own abilities to “read” people.  This whole context—the notion of reading people—is out of place in today’s business world, as we now know that working with people is a continuous process of understanding them, not just some kind of gut-check assessment upon the first meeting or review session.

And understanding your people at work—your colleagues, direct reports, and your own managers—is, as we discussed in a recent blog post, one of the core foundations of building high performance teams at companies, along with trust and openness.  High performance has a direct correlation with employees’ ability, no matter their role, to develop relationships and earn credibility, whether that credibility lies with their supervisors, colleagues, or the people who report to them.

If managers and employees are seeking to improve their performance through strengthening relationships at work, then they need to ditch the reading people mindset and get down to the harder work of really understanding them.  And in order to gain this understanding, they must focus on the journey, not certain events along the way, like a certain project, recent mishap, windfall, or performance reviews.

Understanding people is a process, and the process is defined by multiple interactions and perceptions on the part of the people involved.  To begin our process for understanding others, we must first understand ourselves.  As people, we tend to understand ourselves in terms of the things we value, our own strengths, skills, and positive attributes, as well as what we see as our own shortcomings, flaws, or liabilities.  For example, you may see yourself as gregarious, creative, and driven—all fantastic traits. But you may also recognize that you are a procrastinator, lack confidence in high pressure settings, and tend to be defensive when others don’t immediately warm to an idea you think is your most brilliant yet. Thus, you’ve distilled yourself down to these three positives, along with corresponding negatives.

Once we understand ourselves, it’s much easier to see how we can understand others and develop relationships accordingly.  A natural law of attraction—speaking purely in the professional context here—is that we will gravitate toward people, more specifically toward characteristics or behaviors that mirror or complement our own.  This is what separates the good managers from the arrogant ones, the ones who assume they are great at reading and influencing people.  Good managers are willing to engage themselves in the introspection required to have a baseline understanding of themselves—in both relaxed times and high pressure situations, as well as individual work and collaboration with teams—to have that same understanding of others.

What it boils down to, ultimately, is that managers must seek to understand their own greatest strengths and weaknesses, and then seek representative qualities in their employees that provide either amplification of the things they like about themselves or provide a nice counterpoint to the manager’s own weaknesses.  For those arrogant managers, even admitting they have a weakness is a huge first step to better understanding.

So, if you’re an extrovert that tends to be very expressive, but lacks an analytical perspective, you may uncover, through listening and observing, a team member at work who mirrors your extroversion, chooses fewer words, and leans heavily on information-gathering and analysis to make decisions.  In the end, to defeat the unconscious arrogance that’s so rife in management in many companies, managers must be challenged to have humility about their own abilities, re-contextualizing reading people into understanding them, knowing themselves first, and then listening to others to gain perspective on their value to the team and organization at large.

Out with the Old, in with the New--Fresh Frameworks for Human Resources

At TM Solutions, we’ve helped companies to redefine success with regard to getting the most out of their employees. We’ve built our success model as a series of contrasts with old thinking that’s defined human resources management for the last generation.

In this installment, we’ll take a look at the old way, performance management, versus the new path forward, leadership and engagement.  There’s an organization psychology aspect to this—old way companies tend to be very top-down in how they manage the people within their businesses.  Progressive companies are forging a different direction, a fearless pursuit of a more horizontal organization built with leaders at every necessary level.

In order to achieve this new organizational framework that’s better equipped to handle today’s business challenges, companies must address the whole issue of performance. Performance management itself, as a concept, has become a hallmark of rigid, inflexible organizations chained to different ideas of execution.  This type of human resources management is too system driven for the system’s sake, the workplace equivalent of teachers teaching to end-of-grade tests in schools.

Managers and their employees can look forward to all-too-few sessions devoid of real dialogue, where blame and credit are assessed and either acknowledged or deflected, often never empowering the truth that gets results.  Top-down performance management neither breeds leaders nor guarantees proper performance management; in fact, companies using this tired old system are more likely to bring in outside talent than promote from within, and instead of generating better employee performance on the job, it better provides documentation for disciplining and eventually terminating employees.

If the whole idea is to really drive company performance through each and every employee, a new path forward, based on leadership and engagement, is the perfect prescription for companies looking to innovate and adapt to market challenges.  Leadership development requires an ongoing dialogue focused on the unique value and contributions of each employee, both internally within the organization and what external skills and life experiences they bring to the office each day.

Leadership development is much like the way the best coaches in the world of sports approach building their teams into contenders.  The best coaches never get too high emotionally after a win, and they never sink too low after a loss. Don’t be mistaken—this isn’t a win-some, lose-some mentality—rather, it’s a continuous accounting that leadership development of individuals, with the ultimate by-product of a winning team, takes a journey, not a periodic performance appraisal based too much on flattering statistics or egregious errors.

The cornerstone of leadership development is engagement between the manager-coach and the employee-player.  Employees don’t need simple “atta-boys or condemnations”—they need managers who will help them think through current challenges and help them reflect upon winning or losing strategies and tactics from previous projects or initiatives.

Furthermore, engagement is a two-way street.  The worst company managers think that engaging their employees is limited to giving each of them proper feedback.  It’s the old “he knows where the company stands” gambit.  In a true engagement scenario, the employee is free to share his opinion on where the company is falling short in achieving its goals, and the manager reacts by taking those ideas on board and helping her employees to affect change and meet their objectives.

What the new leadership and engagement framework promotes is winning, and winning will never need to be redefined. Winning is making more money, doing it more efficiently, and promoting positive change for the company to achieve its market goals.