Organizational Effectiveness & Performance
What is organizational effectiveness? It addresses how well, given its resources, an organization meets its goals or objectives. In order to achieve a high level of effectiveness, all the members of the organization must demonstrate fairness, honesty, integrity and respect for one another. This leads to a high level of trust, which in turn enables open communication and high levels of collaboration. Organizational Effectiveness is driven by organizational culture and effective leadership behavior. It’s the combination of those two factors that most strongly influences overall organizational performance.
Organizational Health is the ability of an organization to align, execute, and renew its self faster than its competitors, which is just as important as focusing on the traditional drivers of business performance. Organizations that focus on performance and health simultaneously are twice as successful as those focused on performance alone. The key to long-term success is to empower and develop your people to unleash their enthusiasm, creativity, and commitment to propel the business forward. Organizational health includes all the human elements required to achieve sustainable success. Companies typically on tap into a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them.
Research in Collective Intelligence has found that the highest performing groups also have high levels of social perception. Social perceptiveness is a kind of social intelligence. It’s the ability to correctly read the emotions of other people. When it comes to the effectiveness of groups, we are what we see in each other. Putting a group of highly intelligent people together doesn’t guarantee the highest performance or the best result. In fact, a group of average people where everyone actively participates and openly collaborates that also demonstrates high social perceptiveness can be expected to have the best outcome.
A 2014 global survey on workplace trust found that more than half of employees don’t trust their boss. Two thirds of employees don’t feel safe communicating with the boss about any type of failure on the job, nor are they willing to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them. All of which is necessary in order for creativity and innovation to flourish. This study found that the highest performing organizations (5% – 10% revenue growth over the prior year) were the ones with highly effective leadership and productive collaboration in high trust environments.
Organizational Emotional Intelligence is defined as an organization’s ability to successfully and efficiently cope with change and accomplish its goals, while being responsible and sensitive to its people, customers, suppliers, networks, and society by Steven Stein, PhD, in his book Make Your WorkPlace Great: The 7 Keys to an Emotionally Intelligent Organization. Having an organization with high emotional intelligence provides the foundation for high levels of trust, collaboration, productivity, innovation, and above average financial performance.
Organizational Performance is tied to many things. Fundamentally, nothing happens in an organization until its people step-up and get the job done. So, it’s crucial to understand what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the people in your workforce. By assessing how they feel, you can predict how they’re going to perform. How willing and able they are to go the extra mile to ensure your organization’s success? That’s information worth knowing, especially when you consider a variation on an old saying that sounds like this:
They don’t care about how well your organization does until they know how much you care about how well they do!
How does your organization stack up? Are you meeting your goals and objectives? How high do you rate your organization’s performance?
My consulting practice is built on the concepts of organizational effectiveness, health, and performance because they are tied to the fundamental issues that plague most businesses. I searched until I found assessment tools that are professionally designed, rigorously tested, and scientifically validated that accurately confirm the underlying issues so that no time or resources are wasted on things that will have little or no effect.
We both know that you can’t solve a problem until it’s been accurately diagnosed. So many of the problems that executives, like you, struggle with on a daily basis are symptoms of things that have more to do with how people think, act, and interact than anything else. These instruments take out the guess work and allow us to quickly get to the heart of the matter and develop a plan to overcome those issues and improve performance. Contact us HERE if you’d like to learn more.
How well an organization functions depends on a variety of factors. While most organizations focus on the technical aspects of its operations, the breakdowns usually occur between people. Emotional Intelligence is a scientifically proven avenue to evaluate how well people manage themselves and their relationships with others. As demands for talent heat up and other opportunities for your top performing employees become available, organizations need to ensure that they retain their key employees.
In a July 2015 Inc article entitled “Why Workplace Diversity is Critical But Not a Crutch,” the number one suggestion for creating thriving environment with high levels of productivity and innovation is to “Keep tabs on the ever-changing workplace environment.” They report that anonymous surveys allow you to hear directly from your employees about what matters most to them, while providing your staff a way to share their opinions without worrying about repercussions.
The Organizational Benchmark Survey is one way to scientifically determine how your organization is fairing on the following key areas:
- Job Happiness
- Compensation
- Pay
- Benefits
- Work/Life Stress Management
- Stability
- Stress Management
- Work/Life Balance
- Organizational Cohesiveness
- Coworker Relationships
- Teamwork
- Supervisory Leadership
- Diversity and Anger Management
- Diversity Climate
- Gender/Racial Acceptance
- Anger Management
- Organizational Responsiveness
- Training and Innovation
- Optimism and Integrity
- Courage and Adaptability
- Top Management Leadership
- Positive Impression/Negative Impression
Don’t mistake polite compliant employees for happy ones. Your best people will have the most options. The cost to replace them is high. A rule of thumb is 50% of their annual salary. The Organizational Benchmark Survey is a smart choice when you consider the alternative. In addition to telling you where you stand with your employees, it also compares you against other companies too, which helps put things into perspective.
Having employees with polite respectful behavior is not the same as having employees who trust and respect you enough to tell you when things go wrong. Are you forging trusting relationships with your employees? How can you be sure?
It’s long been reported that leaders with high “people” skills achieve the best results and are considered to be the most successful. People skills is a pretty vague term. The EQ-i 2.0 Leadership Report applies science to that fuzzy language and provides you with meaningful information on 21 emotional intelligence factors plus 4 leadership competencies that have be associated with productivity, decreased turnover, increased efficiency, greater work satisfaction, creators of trust, and those who foster organizational commitment and loyalty. In addition to providing an explanation for each factor, you also learn about the leadership impact, receive strategies for taking action, and tips for balancing your emotional intelligence.
But that’s not enough because we all have blind spots. Those things that we do or don’t do but should that keep up from realizing our full potential. That’s where the EQ 360 Leadership Report comes in. It takes the same EQ-i 2.0Leadership Assessment and asks the people in your personal and professional lives to answer the same questions about you from their perspective. Those responses are compared to your own answers to those questions. The results are plotted on multiple graphs so you can see where you are in agreement and where there are blind spots. It brings to light those issues that are holding you back from achieving your desired results. Armed with this information, you can focus your time and energy where it will do the most good.
Another essential aspect of leadership is identifying and acting on the right risks. It sounds simple until you try to do it. It’s easy to either get swept up in the excitement of the moment and make a choice based on intuition or get so overwhelmed by research and analysis that making the right choice seems impossible. Knowing your own Risk Type can go along way in helping you understand your own natural reaction to a given situation and the appropriate counterbalancing steps you need to take to ensure a good outcome. The RiskType Compass Assessment provides scientifically validated insight into your risk management profile to help you successfully navigate through risk and uncertainty, which is a critical leadership skill.
Executive Team Effectiveness is paramount to the success of a growing organization. One where everyone contributes wholeheartedly to the organizations’ success.
Three assessments that can help executive teams understand their impact on the organization are available:
The Benchmark of Organizational Emotional Intelligence Report provides insight into two organizational leadership perspectives. First, the Top Management Leadership sub-scale is a component of the Organizational Responsiveness component of the report. This sub-scale measures the degree to which people see top management as supportive of their ideas and initiatives, committed to earning the trust and confidence of its employees, and devoted to leading with a clear vision that is communicated to employees. The second is the Supervisory Leadership scale that evaluates the effectiveness of supervisors as seen by the people they supervise. It measures people’s general satisfaction with their immediate supervisors, and specifically examines their perceptions of the supervisor’s willingness to share information and involve others in decision making, as well as the supervisor’s ability to coach, provide feedback, and mediate conflicts. It also measures perception of the supervisor’s trustworthiness, confidence, and self-awareness.
The second is the EQ-i 2.0 Executive Team Group Report, which provides each of the 21 scores identified in the EQ-i 2.0 model, along with the three highest and lowest scores, and strategies for action. This report differs from the Benchmark of Organizational Emotional Intelligence Report in that it looks at the detailed components of emotional intelligence and offers insight into the dynamics of the team as a whole.
The third is the RiskType Compass Group Report, which is designed to explore the team’s predisposition to risk and it’s capacity to handle risk related decisions. The report provides several graphics reporting different risk perspectives, which can reveal sources of conflict and indecision along with its center of gravity and group risk tolerance index.
Get a clearer picture of the dynamics of your executive team by completing both the EQ-i 2.0 Executive Team and the RiskType Compass Assessments. Review of both reports provides a broader perspective of the underlying issues that impact the effectiveness of the leadership team. Once you see how everyone on the executive team interprets the world around them, you can understand how to bring everyone together to solve the challenges that face your organization.
Every person in the organization matters. Getting the best from the people in the organization begins with setting them up to succeed in their role. Using the EQ-i 2.0 Workplace Report helps to identify areas of strength, as well as, opportunities for growth and development in the areas of emotional intelligence, which has been proven to be more important than IQ in workplace success.
Each position in the organization has different needs. For example, customer service representatives need to have the ability to balance empathy and flexibility with their responsibility to the organization (i.e. meeting customer needs without undue harm to the organization). Every person needs to have the right technical and emotional skills to succeed in their role. If they are struggling and you can’t understand why, the issue may not be on the technical side. Instead, it may be those emotional skills that are hard to pin down and address. That’s where the EQ-i 2.0 comes in. It is a scientifically validated instrument proven to measure all five areas of emotional intelligence: decision making, stress management, social or interpersonal skills, self-perception, and self-expression (plus overall well-being).
In instances where the individual isn’t realizing their full potential, it’s possible that they are suffering from blind spots in their behavior. They perceive that themselves as having a positive influence on the world around them but those in their sphere of influence have a different perspective. Where the person is unknowingly doing things or failing to do things that are undermining their success. In cases like these, the EQ 360 2.0 Report can be a valuable resource.
It has been reported that the average knowledge worker makes approximately 200 decisions per day on the job. Granted most of them are small but even those small decisions can add up to a significant cumulative effect. Both decision making and stress management skills are essential for workplace success. In addition to supporting the traditional areas of emotional and social intelligence, the EQ-i 2.0 assessment clearly identifies decision making and stress management skills as well.
In areas where risk and even stronger decision making skills are required, the RiskType Compass Assessment can add value in supporting the individual’s role and responsibilities to the organization. The Individual Report identifies their individual predisposition to risk and their capacity to manage the risks in their work role. The report provides their risk type, the upside and downside tendencies for that risk type, the most prominent characteristics for that risk type, the areas where they are most comfortable taking risks (out of 5 predefined domains), and their Risk Tolerance index. A better understanding of a persons risk type provides a better sense of how much risk that person is willing to take, how much uncertainty they can cope with and how the are likely to react when things go wrong.
In combination, the EQ-i 2.0 Workplace, the EQ 360 2.0, and the Individual RiskType Compass Reports can provide essential information about an individual’s effectiveness in their role and their overall ability to contribute to the organization’s success. Consider these assessments for critical roles within your organization and for those people with high growth potential that you want to groom for greater responsibilities in the future.
Sadly, dysfunctional teams are common place throughout the business world. Dysfunctional teams often struggle with trust, communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation, timely project execution, and safety issues. Failures in these areas undermine the organization’s effectiveness, its ability to respond to changes in the marketplace in a timely manner, and leads to missed opportunities with untold financial repercussions.
While a lack of technical skills may play a role in the dysfunctional behavior of teams, the majority of issues center around a lack of emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness in team members. The Benchmark of Organizational Emotional Intelligence Assessment measures seven key areas (Job Happiness, Compensation, Work/Life Stress Management, Organizational Cohesiveness, Supervisory Leadership, Diversity and Anger Management, and Organizational Responsiveness plus 14 subscales) and provides three reporting levels. The highest level is organizational wide, next is by administrator-defined groups (e.g. departments, teams, occupational levels, etc.), and the individual participants make-up the detailed level. The group report can compare up to 5 teams with each other in a single report.
While individual EQ-i 2.0 assessments can be used to address individual issues, the EQ-i 2.0 Group Report can provide great insight into the dynamics of the entire team and a foundation for informed focused team development efforts on any of the 21 scores identified in the report. The top and bottom three categories provide a great information for raising team performance up a level. Take the guess work out of the equation and get to the heart of the matter.
For teams that deal with higher risk environments that have greater or more complex decision making responsibilities, the RiskType Compass Group Report provides unprecedented insight into the underlying dynamics that may be rendering the team to be ineffective in their role. The group profile graphically displays the individual risk type for each person on the team, which is essential in ensuring that there is a sufficient diversity in risk types in the group. It also provides a graphical representation of the risk type influences at play in the group, it reports the group’s center of gravity, and their combined risk tolerance index.
The team leader is also provided with the socio metric implications of the group, which includes a graphic for each individual’s position on the compass in relation to the group members who they are most and least similar to in terms of risk type. This analysis allows for a more detailed understanding of the groups dynamics.
The team leader RiskType Compass Group Report concludes with a one page summary of individual profiles for each member of the team (no names are provided, just reference numbers). The summary includes their risk type, their risk attitude profile, the prominent characteristics for their risk type, and their risk tolerance index. These insights can reveal conflicting characteristics. Once revealed they can be addressed and empower the group to move forward with new awareness and appreciation for what each team member brings to the table.
As organizations grow, some positions are held by multiple employees. Overtime, organizations benefit from developing a profile for their highest performers that includes their characteristics and the processes that enable them to achieve the best results. Armed with this information, the organization can refine its employee selection process to include those individuals with similar characteristics and train those new recruits (and existing personnel) in the highly effective processes used by its high performers.
This type of special review can include determining a clear definition of what high performance looks like in that particular position, assessments of individuals, review of compensations plans, performance reviews, employee interviews, interviews of supervisors, observation of employees performing their daily duties, evaluation of work space, assessment of work place tools and work aids, workflow/process analysis, in addition to other review techniques.
The EQ-i 2.0 Assessment has proven to be a good indicator of the people skills needed to excel in specific rolls. For example, all branches of the US military use the EQ-i 2.0 Assessment in the selection of Recruiters. The insurance industry was the first to recognize the benefit of using the EQ-i 2.0 Assessment in the selection of Sales Agents. Identifying the essential characteristics for candidates to later be successful and satisfied in their jobs has saved millions of dollars in hiring and training costs driven by high turn-over rates that you get when you don’t hire the right person for the job in the first place.
Use a High Performer Analysis in conjunction with the EQ-i 2.0 Assessment to improve the success rate of your talent selection process.
Business Design 2.0 was developed as a way to Future Proof your organization through high performing behaviors and extremely effective operations. Businesses that use the traditional hierarchical organization structure struggle with problems like information and resource silos that lead to internal strife and management practices that encourage self-interest over being a dedicated team player. The Business Design 2.0 framework is a holistic approach that creates a brain friendly environment rich with creativity, innovation, and cohesiveness. Extensive details about all the major aspects of the design are available on the main menu under the Business Design 2.0 tab and supporting pages.
If you’re looking for a better way… click here to contact us and LEARN MORE!