Episode #67: How to Improve the Health of Your Organization
Welcome to THE CAREER ACCELERATOR, the podcast where corporate managers will find tips and tools to deliver results through others.
Hello. Today I will share a model that will help you improve the health of your organization.
I’m your host, Percy Cannon.
In our last episode I invited you to assess how well you generated business results in 2023 through your three key audiences: your team, your colleagues and your boss. Some of the questions I suggested to use were:
1. With your team:
· Did you set clear expectations and goals?
· Did you empower and develop your team?
· Did you foster vulnerability-based trust and collaboration?
2. With your colleagues:
· Did you build collaborative relationships?
· Did you encourage a culture of accountability?
· Did you promote a positive team culture?
3. With your boss:
· Did you understand your boss's goals and priorities?
· Did you align your work with company objectives?
· Did you provide clear and actionable updates?
If you haven’t done so yet, you can leverage the script of that podcast to make it easier for you to assess your scores.
Today, I want to share a simple but powerful model that can significantly improve the health of your organization.
During the first months of this year, I have used with clients a simple yet very effective 16-question self-assessment, which allowed them to gauge the health of their organization. Each of these questions map to one of the four steps of the Organizational Health Model developed by the best-selling author Patrick Lencioni in his book The Advantage, which I have outlined in previous podcasts.
A healthy organization is one that has minimized politics and confusion. This translates into higher productivity and employee morale, and lower attrition of good people.
What does an organization have to do to get healthy? There are four steps:
1. The first one is to achieve behavioral alignment within your team to operate in a cohesive way. If your team, whether it’s a corporation, a department within that corporation or a functional group, behaves in dysfunctional ways, this dysfunction will cascade into the rest of the organization and prevent organizational health.
There are five concrete dysfunctional behaviors that a team can avoid. Here’s a quick summary:
The first one is to achieve vulnerability-based trust, where team members can ask for help or say I’m sorry to each other.
Trust enables us to overcome the second dysfunction, which is the absence of conflict or constructive debate.
Conflict is important because it enables us to overcome the third dysfunction: the lack of commitment. We shouldn’t passively commit to a decision through a timid okay. Instead, every person should feel they have been listened to.
Commitment is critical because without it, members of the team will hesitate to hold each other accountable, which is the fourth dysfunction, and it's typically the most difficult one to address.
The fifth and final dysfunction is the inattention to the collective results of the team, as opposed to the results of your department or your own career or personal interests.
2. The second step for building a healthy organization is ensuring that members of the team are crystal clear and 100 percent intellectually aligned around six simple but critical questions. Healthy organizations minimize the potential for confusion by clarifying the following topics:
a. Why do we exist?
a. How do we behave? What are the core values displayed by our behaviors?
b. What do we do?
c. How will we succeed? This is about defining your key strategic choices.
d. What is most important right now, for the whole team?
e. Who must do what?
3. The third step is over-communicating the answers to the six questions. This can only happen after the first two steps in this process, behavioral and intellectual alignment, have been achieved. Leaders of a healthy organization constantly repeat themselves and reinforce what is true and important.
4. Finally, in addition to over-communicating, leaders must ensure that the answers to the six critical questions are reinforced repeatedly using simple human and business systems. All those processes, which involve people, such as hiring, firing, performance management, decision-making, and even meetings, should support and emphasize the uniqueness of the organization.
Summarizing, if you want to minimize politics and confusion, improve your organization’s productivity and the morale of your employees, and lower attrition of good people, consider applying the 4-step model of Organizational Health:
1. Align the behaviors of your team,
2. Align the intellectual clarity of your team by answering 6 critical questions,
3. Over-communicate this clarity to the rest of the organization, and
4. Reinforce this clarity through simple human and business systems.
Contact me so we can set up this free, 16-question assessment developed by Lencioni’s company, to determine where your organization has the biggest opportunity for growth.
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. In the next one, I will continue to provide content that can help you become a more effective leader and a better team player.
If you like what you heard today, and depending on the platform you're using, let me ask you to please rate, subscribe, or follow this podcast and share it with your coworkers and friends. Also, you can request a free coaching call with me by using the links provided on this platform.
This is Percy Cannon, working to help you make the rest of your life…the best of your life®.