By David Searle – One Of The UK’s Leading Practitioners In Analysing The Health Of An Organisation.
Have you heard of the term Organisational Health? I’m guessing that to most of the people reading this, it is not a familiar phrase.
Over the past few years, we have become much more comfortable talking about the importance of the health of our employees, and particularly mental health, but how often do we consider the health of the organisation itself?
And if we had a healthy organisation, wouldn’t we have solved many of the day-to-day problems that our organisations and HR colleagues spend their time and energy on. So what does it mean to have a healthy organisation?
What if I told you that there are 5 areas that drive the health of an organisation, and these 5 areas can be quantified, assessed and improved. And getting these 5 areas right would give your organisation the best competitive advantage that it will ever find. These 5 areas aren’t a secret and anyone who has been involved with long-term successful organisations knows the power of:
• Great Leadership
• Great Teamwork
• Great Culture
• Great organisational Structure
• And Clarity of Strategy
Most of our businesses focus on areas that are data driven because it is comfortable and relatively easy to understand. Really good organisations understand that it is the people in an organisation that make it great. Unfortunately, working to improve the people side of a business can be subjective, emotional and awkward and therefore often ignored – or delegated to our HR colleagues.
Many of you will have heard Richard Branson’s famous quote that “it is not the clients who should come first in an organisation, it is the employees because they are the ones that take care of your clients”.
The other quote I really like relating to the importance of your people is “nothing will destroy a great employee’s morale faster than watching their employer tolerate and reward a bad one”.
So how do we work towards having a healthy organisation? Some parts are really simple, such as the importance of assessing and driving appropriate behaviours. If you have recruited for long enough, most of us have, at some point, recruited someone who has the skills we need, but poor behaviours meant they became a toxic employee. Recruiting poorly is costly and benefits no-one. The toxic employee diminishes the culture of the business, demotivates others and is often costly to remove. What if we could only recruit people who fit into the culture we want our businesses to be – actually that is not particularly difficult.
Netflix are a leading example of how clarity of Values and Behaviours can help with this process. Search “Netflix values” and you are taken to their jobs section where they clearly explain what sets Netflix apart from others, and the behaviours that all employees must demonstrate. People who don’t like what they read will generally rule themselves out of even applying to work for a company that openly states that they “keep only our highly effective people”.
How many of you involved in recruitment actively test whether someone will fit into the business – and rule out those who won’t before considering the candidates skills and experience?
I really like Patrick Lencioni’s Ideal Team Player model which allows you to assess and understand whether someone will be a great term player and refers to the 3 key attributes of Hungry, Humble and Smart; although I do find that in the UK it is better to refer to Humility, Emotional Intelligence and Work Efficacy when explaining the benefits of using and implementing the techniques. Asking someone in an interview to explain “how would your past colleagues describe you, and what would be the one thing they would say you could improve upon?” is a great question to begin to check someone’s level of Emotional Intelligence. Try it and see which candidates understand and are open to their weaknesses, and which candidates find it difficult to answer.
Organisations that don’t work to improve their health can allow politics, dysfunction and misery to develop. Their teams are misaligned and their employees waste energy on the wrong things rather than driving the business forward. For the employee it is not much better, with many describing work as drudgery and they can lose hope and self-esteem. The better employees are the ones who find other jobs, leaving the organisation with the cost of trying to replace them.
I frequently hear of organisations whose employees describe the culture as working in silos. Again, it is not difficult to correct this with the correct treatment. Silos develop when people or teams are insulated from what other teams or the business is trying to achieve. Set the wrong objectives, or measure people on the wrong things, and it will always drive someone’s focus the wrong way. My favourite story about misaligned KPIs is the bus company who started to measure its driver’s ability to complete their route in a given time. The drivers worked out that by driving past the bus stops and not picking up any passengers allowed them to hit their targets – a result that is not exactly what the bus company wanted.
So, to avoid silos, an organisation needs clarity of what it is trying to achieve, and a clear tier of the order of priorities. This might look like providing clarity of the single most important thing that the organisation needs to achieve in the next 3-12 months, followed by the critical objectives that the business is focusing on changing, followed by the standard operating objectives (Key Metrics) that are important for running the business; and finally, the personal objectives of how someone can support the business objectives. Providing this tiered clarity allows your people to understand and make the same decisions that the leaders would make. Clarifying the importance of picking up as many passengers as possible before the need to complete the route in a given time allows your drivers to make the right decision for the business.
When I talk to organisations about helping them to improve their health, I always quote the 5 areas in order of Leadership, Teamwork, Culture, Structure and Clarity of Strategy. I always start with Leadership as leadership always has the most fundamental impact on the health of an organisation.
Leaders can be great and leaders can be toxic. Some examples of toxic leadership can be:
• autocratic (overly imposing their will),
• intimidating (bullying others to achieve their aim).
• overly competitive (a win at all costs mentality leaving a trail of broken people who have failed to keep up with them),
• manipulative (focus on themselves before the business),
• discriminatory (do not want to be challenged so surround themselves with “yes-people”),
• narcissistic (exaggerated self-importance and lacking empathy when dealing with others),
A leader must drive the right culture and behaviours, and I believe this is a fundamental leadership requirement in the same way as having the right vision or the ability to get the right people on the right bus. A leader must be the first person to display the characteristics that they want the organisation’s culture to be. A leader who cannot show vulnerability is sending a message across the organisation that says “I don’t show vulnerability, and I don’t expect you to do either”.
A leader must create an environment where team members can challenge one-another on fundamental issues in a safe environment; and the leader must call out and deal with poor behaviours or will have doomed the organisation to those behaviours. For example, allowing politics to develop in an organisation is a key leadership failure.
Some great leaders, including Nelson Mandella and Sir Chris Bonnington, have talked openly about the importance of withholding their opinion in order to allow others to grow into the space created. Expressing your views too early as a leader can create an environment where others rely on the opinion and direction of the leader. This leadership characteristic can stifle the ownership and initiative displayed by team members. If you want ownership and initiative in an organisation, it is the behaviours of the leaders that need to change first.
I talk about Organisational Health as the most important way to improve the performance of businesses and the best competitive advantage you will ever find. Who wouldn’t prefer to spend their time driving the business towards a great culture, rather than spending time replacing great employees who have decided to move. Think of it as curing the disease rather than dealing with the symptoms.
I hope these words have helped stimulate your thoughts on the health of the organisations that you work in and for. With employees becoming more discerning of who they work for, organisations that display minimal politics and have high morale and productivity become places of choice to work. These organisations have low turnover of good employees and are more successful. Afterall, people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave because of bad leaders, poor management and a lack of appreciation for their worth.
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