Phase 1 – Reveal Underlying Issues that are Getting in Your Way:
Unravel What’s Keeping Your People from Doing Their Best Work
Do you know what your people think about you, your organization, and what life is like in their shoes? It’s the exception rather than the rule for an employee to speak-up. Instead, they usually vote with their feet. If the future isn’t promising, your top performers will be the first to leave. You’ll be left with the folks who don’t have better options. What do you think that does for performance?
Uncover Causes of Team Dysfunction
Some teams are in a constant state of turmoil, can’t agree on anything, don’t meet deadlines, and finger point instead of working things out. These problems go beyond personalities and tie into fundamental skills and capabilities that can be difficult to identify and address. One thing for sure is that dysfunctional teams destroy performance.
Reveal Underlying Decision Making Challenges
Inability to make decisions and take action once a decision is made is a pretty common problem. On the flip side, making snap decisions when thoughtful analysis is in order is equally destructive. The challenge is finding the right balance and getting things done, organizational performance hangs in the balance.
Phase 2 – Raise Staff Performance:
Identify Performance Blind Spots
Most people don’t go to work thinking, “I’m going to do a crappy job today!” Rather, they go to work and do what they think they are supposed to be doing, the way they think it’s supposed to be done…yet there is often a gap between expectations and their performance. This problem escalates exponentially as your organization grows and you have to rely on others to help manage your people.
The reality is that we all have blind spots. The question is, what is the cumulative effect of all those blind spots on your business…
Gauge Leadership Potential & Stack the Deck With Power House Potential
There is a common misconception that a supervisor can tell who the top performers are and who will be the best candidate for promotion.
In reality, the supervisor’s favorites are often the people that they like. The people that are most like themselves or even the people who represent the least threat to the supervisor’s own aspirations.
Far too frequently, the wrong people get promoted. Until suddenly one day you realize that the people in your organization with “authority” to get things done aren’t capable of doing the job or taking your organization to the next level.
Are you positioning your organization with the power to catapult your organization’s performance?
Develop Staff Skills in the Workflow
The best way to boost your organization’s long-term performance is to grow your entire workforce. Most companies don’t pursue this route because the traditional routes are expensive, take employees off the job for extended periods of time, if (or when) the employee leaves they take the “knowledge” with them, and traditional behavioral change programs seldom work for the long-term. When you look at it like that, it’s easy to understand the hesitation to invest staff development.
Shrewd leaders know that advances in technology and neuroscience have lowered the cost of workforce advancement, empowered learning in the workflow, made it possible to train all employees not just a select few, and made available approaches that ensure behavioral change stick!
Are you one of those astute open-minded leaders that’s ready to infuse their organization with the fuel to propel your performance into the future?
Phase 3 – Optimize Organizational Design to Improve Overall Performance:
Raise Your Collective Intelligence
Everywhere you turn, people are talking about the importance of creativity and innovation. Organizational executives consistently say it’s one of their top 3 priorities. Yet their business practices say otherwise. For example, when they solicit new recruits their job descriptions say applicants must have X number of years in the same position in the same industry. On top of that they still use a traditional hierarchical organizational structure that segregates the workforce into departments or homogeneous groups of people with similar skills and thought processes.
It’s no secret, if you want creativity, you need to be open to other points of view. You need to create an environment that stimulates discussion that’s accepting of different opinions. An climate that makes people feel safe and comfortable enough to speak-up. A diverse setting rich with inspiration and imagination. A place where every person’s opinion is valued. A workplace like this doesn’t just happen, it has to be designed with this goal in mind.
The default approach is to do what everyone else does…and then expect different results. What type of setting do you have in your organization? Are you setup to raise your collective intelligence or maintain the status quo?
Expand Organizational Capabilities
One thing that people don’t think about when they setup a hierarchical organizational structure is how much bureaucracy it takes to maintain and operate. All those resources could be diverted into expanding the organizations capabilities.
Hierarchical organizations are inward focused. As a result, they are often surprised by changes in the market place. Being caught off-guard in business can be life threatening.
Every organization needs to be continuously sensing what’s going on in the world around them. Understand the risks and have a realistic picture of the rewards. Recognize and seize opportunities when they arise. And the strength of conviction to redeploy resources as appropriate to ensure the organization will survive turbulent times.
Where are your organizational resources tied up? Are you focused on sensing and seizing opportunities?
Future Proof Your Organization
It’s pretty common for organizations to have some type of leadership succession plan and maybe even a little training too. Today that’s not enough. Reports on the lack of skilled job candidates keep piling up. It’s only going to get worse before it gets better. Savvy executives are building workforce pipelines in their organizations to ensure they have exactly the talent they need, precisely when they need it.
Most employers have been hesitant to build this capacity into their organizations. They may be thinking that they can steal away the people they need when the time comes. Boy, are they going to be surprised…that approach creates a culture of job hoppers. They will pay for the failure to create their own pipeline in employee turnover.
In the 2014 Global Human Capital Trends report, Deloitte Consulting reported that one of the top five things that drive a highly engaged (and productive) workforce is people’s ability to learn and grow. Employees know that a growing organization presents growth opportunities for them too, so they’re motivated to stimulate a continuous growth cycle.
Is your organization equipped with growing minds and skills to take on whatever comes your way? When the time comes to pivot, will your people be capable enough to take your organization where it needs to go to survive?
Boosting Performance is Multifaceted
Boosting performance isn’t just one thing, it’s many things. It means identifying and fixing what’s broken. Up-skilling your entire labor pool, not just a select few. Building a workforce pipeline to ensure you have the talent that you will need tomorrow. Organizing your people in a way that is outward focused, with enough diversity to stimulate creativity and innovation. Developing the capability to sense and the risk tolerance to seize opportunities as they arise, and the fortitude to redeploy resources as necessary to ensure long-term performance.
When you add all that to your daily workload, it probably seems overwhelming. So much so that you choose to freeze and do nothing, putting everything you’ve worked for at risk…
There’s no magic wand, but there is a manageable path. I’ve gathered an array of scientifically validated assessments based on neuroscience to accurately identify the fundamental people problems that are getting in your way. I’ve put together a host of affordable options for up-skilling your entire workforce, while staying on the job, including something that I call Dripped & Flipped Training™ that incorporates both neuroscience and advances in learning and development.
I’ve also created a flexible framework designed to raise your collective intelligence, expand your organizational capabilities and help ensure you and your people have a bright future. It incorporates the latest findings for high performing organizations and can serve as a checklist to ensure you haven’t overlooked something crucial to your long-term success.
