Organizational Health

Organizational Health is the ability of an organization to align, execute, and renew itself 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 only tap into a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them.

Where do you begin to build good organizational health? Start with Building Trust…

Trust

Trust is at the heart of the Business Design 2.0 Framework. Trust, not blind trust, is essential in every relationship. In business, in particular, we need to establish processes and systems that trust but verify. Trust comes from the alignment of the words and deeds of each person individually and the organization collectively.

Organizations with high levels of trust can operate more effectively, efficiently, and with lower operating costs. The Framework focuses on three ways to build trust:

Transparency – Transparent organizations are better able to self-police and do not need excessive bureaucracy and controls to protect assets and ensure productivity. Instead it relies on the “neighborhood watch” approach and peer pressure, which are naturally occurring human behaviors.

Fairness – Fair processes garner trust and commitment particularly when the outcome wasn’t the one that was initially supported. Fair processes garner wide spread participation, encourage engagement, include effective explanations that are understood by all parties affected, and make it completely clear what is expected of them and the reasons why.

Stakeholder Interest Alignment – Stakeholders are anyone who is impacted by the organization and can include employees, suppliers, alliance partners, financing providers, educational institutions, and the community at large. The general idea is to start with the organizations’ purpose and then develop a value generation process that incorporates how all the organizations’ stakeholders’ interest align. This approach builds, trust, strong relationships, and resilience.

Direction Motivates

Without a stated purpose to the contrary, the assumption will always be that the sole driving motivation is to make the owners (shareholders) rich, at the expense of everyone else, period. It’s the default mindset. As a result, the organization must declare its purpose (beyond profits) if it intends to engage its stakeholders.

Purpose drives passion, passion drives people. Don’t confuse a purpose that serves the greater good with performing miracles like finding the cure for cancer. While curing cancer is a very worthy cause, it’s not the only one. There are every day ways that every organization can make our world a better place.

Purpose – our reason for existence, particularly one that makes our world a better place is a strong intrinsic motivator.

Core Values – are one way to ensure that you have a cohesive team. They are a set of clearly defined shared values that drive the choices that are made along the way to realizing our driving purpose.

Vision – provides the interim steps used to progress forward towards achieving our ultimate purpose.

Mission – assumes a time frame of 5 to 10 years and is the main focus of our efforts to realize our vision that moves us closer to achieving our purpose.

Strategy – The big picture plan to achieve the mission.

Business Model – the practical application of our strategy that incorporates our entire organization.

Goals – The tactical activities that are necessary to achieve the mission. Each unit of the organization will identify the goals it will achieve to ensure that the organizations overarching goals are realized.mes a time frame of 5 to 10 years and is the main focus of our efforts to realize our vision that moves us closer to achieving our purpose.

Management Methods

Companies are actually delicate eco systems rather than machines. The management model needs to be designed in a way that transitions away from human spec sheets, annual re-calibration, learning experiences that operate more like system maintenance/upgrades and cold calculating decommission and dismantling at any sign of trouble. Humanized management processes/methods could include:

Details for each category are available on the Management Methods page.