It is easy to recognise when things are not going well in an organisation: bad press, unhappy clients, lower stakeholder confidence, high staff turnover, tricky Estimates Committee hearings, just to name a few symptoms!
But what can organisations do to turn around their performance? And how do they describe and measure success?
Today’s organisations are living, adaptive networks, with complex business environments and a wide range of influencers and stakeholders, living in a world of constant, fast-paced changes on multiple levels, where what we know and what we have learned quickly reaches its use-by date.
When leaders look at their organisation to diagnose what has gone wrong, it is difficult sometimes to diagnose what the problem is. Most organisational problems are complex, with many causes and symptoms, and it can be difficult to know what to do first and what interventions are needed.
A quick review of some organisational development research and management literature offers these ten tips for better business performance.
Tip #1
Reading the context
Organisational leadership must thoroughly understand its external business environment, its legislative and legal basis, its funding arrangements, its clients, its stakeholders, its competitors, other players, influencers, and related networks that impact on the business ecosystem that the organisation is working within
Understanding our business ecosystem is essential in designing and delivering business strategy and operations and delivering outcomes.
Lots of money, effort and time is wasted in implementing the wrong organisational intervention. Taking the time to understand the site and the terrain and the factors that will influence the organisation in achieving its aims is really important before rushing into action. [1]
Tip #2
Who is on our team?
Organisations needs to have the most effective organisational design, job design and job mix and the right people in place working together to do its work. That is the short way to describe the complex work in getting the optimal organisational and job design and classifications, best practice recruitment to acquire the best people available and reward them well and working on the organisational culture and stories to show how people in this organisation work together to achieve results.
Every organisation’s design is different, and as organisations are living entities, design needs to be flexible and capable of rapid change, having regard to the labour demand and supply environment, as well as changes to its business, and to address the needs that come up from working within the business ecosystem. Today’s organisations often need very flexible arrangements (“structure” is too inflexible a concept) and have more multi-disciplinary teams that can be assembled as needed, work effectively together, and disband at the end of the project, moving on to the next project. This flexible design then drives the recruitment and career development components that work together that result in having the right people in the right place at the right time doing fabulous work that they love and are well remunerated for!
Whilst hierarchical structures are often too inflexible and slow to adapt in today’s business ecosystem, flat organisational structures which can be more adaptive and respond quickly to change can also sometimes struggle with articulating decision-making authority and corporate policy. Further, responsibility for managing, monitoring, and reporting on business and individual performance can be unclear in flat structures. There are very real challenges in maintaining a resource pool to enable the speedy deployment of multi-disciplinary teams as needed. Use of a contingent workforce[2] can assist organisations to be more agile in responding rapidly to new opportunities, although there are downsides to that way of operating as well. Some of these include poorer communication with the contingent workforce regarding matters covered by Employee Handbooks, lack of understanding of the expectations for performance and behaviour, fragmented management of the contingent workforce, and maintaining equal screening processes on recruitment of contingent staff. Having a contingent workforce available means that technology systems and applications used for engagement, scheduling and managing resource allocations to jobs, payroll and invoicing need to have the flexibility to support use of contingent staff[3].
Articulating organisational values may not always seem to have obvious benefits, but leading multinational business enterprises actively rely on corporate values to drive the desired behaviours of line managers and front-line workers. In such complex organisations, integrated suites of plans work at the very top levels or the organisation, but it is not possible for leaders to drive all organisational behaviours through planning processes. Organisational values and desired behaviours at work are critical to success and these are most effectively communicated through social stories eg stories that emphasise teamwork and collaboration over heroes and competitive behaviour, stories that model new roles with new technologies and new ways of working, stories that make real the customer value proposition, and stories that demonstrate the employee value proposition. These values and desired behaviours also need to be aligned with individual performance and remuneration arrangements.
Tip #3
Sharing aligned, living plans
Without a shared vision of who we are, what we do, what are our values, where we are going, how we will get there, and how we will measure success, the people of an organisation are unlikely to be achieving the strategic goals. Without plans on how we are going to navigate the territory, an organisation might have individuals doing what they think is right, but not actually working collaboratively to achieve shared goals or the shared vision. Plans need to be aligned and integrated and flexible and updated as necessary, to set out how the strategic vision is going to be achieved. Organisational plans need to be simple and based on a clear framework, with no more than three goals in each part of the frame ie plan on a page. If people can’t remember or be able to talk about the organisational goals that they are responsible for achieving, they are not likely to be actively working to achieve those goals. Organisations usually have lots of things to accomplish, but plans need to be in manageable, memorable bites. The most recent iteration of the Balanced Scorecard Framework [4] uses the four quadrants of: Clients and External Stakeholders, People and Culture, Internal Business, and Finance (Governance and Risk are also often included in this quadrant) to organise direction, tasks and performance.
Plans need to be in bite sized pieces!
Not only do long term plans need to be split up into short term plans, whether they be 100-day sprints or annual plans, the plans also need to be articulated by organisational unit, covering all organisational functions, and reflected by each person in their performance agreements, and all need to be closely aligned with the organisation’s Strategic Plan.
For example, an organisation’s suite of aligned plans might include:
- A long-term Strategic Plan for the entire organisation, which includes the vision of what the organisation wants to look like at the end of that period of time, then the descriptors for each Balanced Scorecard Quadrant on how to get there, the actions or the to-do list required to achieve those aims, and the long term KPIs to show our progress towards reaching that endpoint.
- A short-term Annual Plan for the entire organisation, and an aligned plan for each Business Unit within the organisation, that sets out the short term to-do list to achieve the first tranche of the Strategic Plan aims, and the KPIs for those plans. This needs to be revised frequently to maintain currency, as well as brevity.
- Individual Performance Plans – annual plans for each person with the organisation, with aims and actions on how that person will work to achieve the Business Unit’s Annual Plan, including personal KPIs and development plans.
Ideally, plans should be able to be summarised to fit on a single page, and should be easy to remember, and refreshed frequently.
Without alignment of all the plans, the efforts of all of the people and business units of the organisation will not be working most effectively together to meet its strategic objectives, nor heading in its desired strategic direction.
Tip #4
Good governance
Good governance is of critical importance to business success in all organisations, especially public sector organisations and NGOs that generally are not funding operations from business profits, and are operating under constant public scrutiny. The reliability, credibility, and trustworthiness of the organisation and its people are essential in building a sustainable, trustworthy business reputation.
Governance needs to start from the ground up, in building in internal controls in business processes and systems, and in job design and delegations. Who does what, who can spend money and how much, who can approve appointments and promotions of staff, who can approve leave and use of corporate assets and the like – all of these need to not only be built in to job design and descriptions, but in forms, work flows and business systems. Every manager with the legal authority to spend the organisation’s money needs to have a budget that is planned, monitored, reported on and reviewed. Delegation Authorities over money and people resources need to be in place and understood. There are so many examples of where governance arrangements have not been in place, with catastrophic results – just think Barings Bank [5].
In government and business, steering committees at executive level are often used as part of a transparent governance framework, but without underpinning governance in the jobs and business processes of the organisation, they cannot achieve the desired results alone. High-level committees are important though, to keep an overwatch on matters that might be of a higher risk to the organisation. Risk management has been part of Australia’s corporate environment for many years, with standards and process tools to assist organisations in identifying and managing risk.
Risk identification, assessment and management also needs to be undertaken each time an organisational unit reviews its operational plan. Risks can change over time, new ones can arrive, so thinking about managing risk needs to be built into the Business-As-Usual planning, doing, monitoring and reporting cycle.
Image source: isaca.org ISACA Journal | Information Technology & Systems Resources
isaca.org ISACA Journal | Information Technology & Systems Resources
In addition to considering governance and risk management at the strategy level, having aims, actions and KPIs for governance and risk management at the organisational plan level is also important in articulating how the organisation wants to do business, and be seen to do business. In government, not only do elected officials want to ensure that public monies raised by taxes are spent wisely in achieving government objectives, they also want to ensure that public confidence in public institutions and administration is maintained and enhanced.
Tip #5
Learning on the job
In modern organisations, internal business processes need to be simple, accessible, fast and supported by on-line on-the-job learning tools to help newcomers get up to speed quickly. Every job in an organisation needs a job description with responsibilities and accountabilities, but that doesn’t always help in what the person needs to do every day, and how their job has inputs from others and delivers outputs to others ie aligned and integrated business processes.
What are reasonable expectations about what a newcomer to a particular job can do in the first week, the first month, the first six months on the job? Every job needs to be supported by on-the-job learning tools, handover checklists, workflow tools and other technology supports with the aim of getting new starters up to speed as quickly as possible, with the least errors, with performance goals that provide a supported path to dealing successfully with more complex work
Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Skills Development [6] provides a useful model for organisations to think about recruitment, on-the-job learning and career development.
When a person first starts in a new role, they need the supports to develop along the Remember, Understand, Apply and Analyse elements in line with their job level and organisational role. Over time, with on-the-job learning and supports combined with effective coaching and performance management approaches, individual employees would generally be expected to develop their level of skills as applicable to their work. Current Learning and Development models apply the 70:20:10 rule ie 70% of learning is expected to occur on the job, 20% of learning comes from peer and collaborative learning, and 10% of learning occurs through formal programs. Career progression models also need to be aligned with approaches to develop each person’s job skills and capabilities.
[6] Bloom, B. S.; Engelhart, M. D.; Furst, E. J.; Hill, W. H.; Krathwohl, D. R. Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals.
Often, organisations need to acquire skilled people quickly, and be able to flexibly deploy them depending on demand and organisational requirements. Rapid hire arrangements need to be in place as well as flexible job and organisational unit descriptors to facilitate speedy responses.
Where the recruitment, development, rewards and remuneration, and career progression approaches are aligned to meet both employee and business needs and objectives, there should also be both high levels of staff satisfaction and staff retention.
Tip #6
High performing teams
There are not too many organisations that can rely on “heroes” to singlehandedly slay corporate dragons, enduring hardship and great trials, to return to the adulation of their peers at the pub! Most work is accomplished by teams, and the best work is done by high performing teams who have the emotional intelligence [7], self-awareness and individual capability to work collaboratively together to achieve organisational tasks.
Teamwork cannot work if the people in the teams do not understand their own strengths and weakness at work, and if they do not have the maturity or emotional intelligence or knowledge of how to build strong work relationships with others. In performance agreements where discussions take place about development, it is important to include avenues for self-development in emotional intelligence and relationship building to help people perform and contribute to their best. Skills development in communication, active listening, how to build relationships of trust [8], dialogue, influencing and conflict resolution are beneficial no matter what stage of career a person is at. Corporate values of respect for others and valuing diversity also can scaffold behaviours in the workplace, particularly where people from different disciplines and backgrounds are put together to work collaboratively on a project.
It is also necessary to build skills in teamwork throughout the organisation, particularly where multi-disciplinary teams are put together quickly for projects – everyone needs to know their own individual work preferences and strengths in teamwork and be willing to share that with the rest of the team. Teams need to be able to develop strategies to ensure that all of the work cycle from research to production to review, is completed by the team, even if all work roles are not present within the team.
The Team Management Systems [9] approach is well researched, used all over the world and is a readily accessible tool to help people and teams go quickly through the forming, storming, norming and performing stages, and to become a high performing team. By identifying individual work preferences and setting out the wheel of work from research and innovation, to planning, producing, checking and review (lessons learned etc), teams can quickly review whether they need or have all of the wheel covered within the team, and devise necessary strategies. Teams can overcome group think, be better at understanding and managing conflicts within the team and have better skills in working together when they understand themselves and each other. This leads to a mindset that includes innovation and continuous improvement, as well as great, reliable, accurate production.
Tip #7
Achieving High Performance
There is a school of thought that everything everyone does in an organisation should be measured and reported in quantitative measures[10]. However, as more recent researchers have realised, organisations are living changing flexible constructs and performance measures need to encompass both qualitative and quantitative measures, covering not just outputs, but also behaviours that contribute to organisational culture and values. An organisation’s KPIs need to be aligned through all of its plans from the long-term Strategic Plan to the individual performance plans, to ensure that everyone is contributing to the organisational accomplishments. Setting SMART[11] aims and KPIs ie Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely, is one way of clarifying organisational expectations in an integrated suite of plans. An important rule of thumb in setting individual performance targets is that the things being measured should be within the control of that person. It is also a truism that what gets measured is what gets done, and it is also good to question where things are not being monitored and reported on, why are they being done?
Organisations today have many technological tools that can drill down into financial and people data to report on expenditure, budgets, turnover, churn, career development activities, amount of work time vs admin time, and the like, and these should be utilized to ensure that the leadership of the organisation can review what is going on and whether organisational aims are being met. Review of these reports frequently also provides the opportunity to identify risks or problems arising early, so that they can be addressed, and plans refreshed to meet those challenges.
Image source: SMART Goals • Red Cap Sales Coaching
Tip #8
It’s all about relationships
Where people trust each other, they work openly with each other freely sharing of their knowledge and experience with others. The converse is also true: turf protection behaviours where people will not even talk to others in the organisation about their work and their job out of fear that their job will be poached or that others will get ahead of them in the promotion stakes. These are not behaviours that support collaborative working or developing high performing teams. So how do we develop relationships of trust and build the trust bank[12]in organisations?
Leadership behaviours include modelling the way, demonstrating daily how we want others to behave at work. This obviously starts with developing our leadership behaviours and emotional intelligence throughout the organisation and ensuring that our recruitment activities also select those with similar values and compatible behaviours. If we want people to trust each other at work, and to work collaboratively with each other, this needs to be modelled from top down. It is also essential that these behaviours are modelled in all interactions with the organisation’s clients, providers, stakeholders and others within the business ecosystem. As the old adage says, for every one person that we tell a great story to about wonderful customer service, we tell ten people about a bad experience!
As well as modelling and building in the desired behaviours into job descriptions and performance agreements, organisations need to build and support the related artefacts eg Customer Service Charters, Customer Complaint Processes, contract management arrangements that allow provider concerns to be heard and managed effectively, staff surveys and the like.
Using social stories to share the values the organisation promotes ie how we want our people to work with each other, with clients, with providers and vendors, and to engage with our community. Transformative change can happen in any organisation when values based social stories are used to describe what is important.
Tip #9
Communication: how fast does bad news go from the bottom to the top?
Lots of research has been carried out into the attributes of successful organisations and how they got there. One issue that comes up repeatedly in great organisations is their fast, responsive and effective communication, within the organisation and outside it, and some organisations measure how long it takes for bad news to travel from the front-line employees in the organisation to its top levels of leadership.
Almost every staff satisfaction survey result that I have seen lists communication in the top five issues of concern leading to staff dissatisfaction. But this is a paradox! Everyone has different ideas about what better communication means! Everyone is very busy in their own job, and most certainly do not want to have more emails or messages to read. Unless an organisation decides to be transparent about what it does, information will still not be available to be disseminated internally. With privacy and FOI legislation and policies in place in government as well as cabinet confidentiality considerations, each organisation needs to consider what information it holds that should be kept either secret or only disseminated with those who need to know. Much information about an organisation’s internal workings does not fall into that category, so is able to be available to those who want to know.
Technology advances now support collaboration environments where organisational members can self-select what they want to know about. These environments also present challenges in navigation to or finding information. This is particularly so when multiple environments are used in an organisation, and they do not synchronise content. The difficulty for every worker now is information overload, and how best to set up communication channels that alert people to things they need to know, and about things they want to know.
Researchers in the field of knowledge management have identified many artefacts, technologies and behaviours that successful organisations have applied to building their corporate capability to respond quickly to change.
Image Source: What is a knowledge Management System? – KPS (kpsol.com)
When considering what to communicate within organisations (and to clients and others in the business ecosystem), these are some of the factors need to be addressed:
- Who is the audience and why do they need to know?
- Is there any legal impediment to the information being shared?
- What are the risks around sharing of sensitive information and are they able to be managed?
- Are there effective internal communications plans and relevant channels to get the right message to the right people?
- Do the organisation’s leadership behaviours model openness and information transparency?
- How does the organisation create opportunities for networking and influencing and for hearing people’s concerns?
- Do all of the organisation’s leadership and people know how to identify business intelligence and know what to do to bring it to the attention of those who will need to deal with it?
Tip #10
Leadership and management
Kouzes and Posner [13] identified five common practices by leaders in great organisations:
Image Source: Five practices of exemplary leadership – SanzuBusinessTraining.com
These leadership behaviours are fundamental to achieving organisational results through people:
- Modelling the behaviours expected of people in the organisation – leading by example
- Inspiring people to work together to achieve strategic results for the organisation – we all work harder to achieve inspirational goals, so leaders who can articulate why the world will be a better place because of what we achieve in this organisation, they are rare and valuable
- Asking the difficult questions about why some things are being done, or being done in a particular way, or by a particular business area or person. Organisations can tend towards inertia if people, systems, processes and behaviours are not challenged, which is one reason why a constant flow of people in and out of an organisation can be a very positive thing
- Enabling others to act not only means clearly delegating tasks to others, but setting up the systems, funding, structures etc to ensure that others can succeed
- Encouraging the heart is more than “Employee of the Month” programs: people want to feel valued and that they belong in their organisation, and that comes from all of the different ways that the organisation interacts with its people and the message that each interaction sends to each person.
And whilst leadership behaviours should be demonstrated right through the organisation at all levels, leadership by itself cannot succeed unless it is supported by effective management of the organisation’s people, resources and systems. The work of the organisation needs to be done, needs to be monitored and reported on, analysed and improvements made. Resourcing plans need to be made and executed, and people need to be managed on the job, in order to achieve business results. Leadership and Management skills are essential in achieving sustainable business results.
Conclusion
In my consulting career, I have worked with many organisations to diagnose business problems and to collaboratively work with the leadership teams to embed business improvements. I have used these tips as part of my consulting practice, to understand how those organisations are functioning and to enable understanding of the context of the business problem.
Every organisation is different, and the things that work well in one place do not always readily translate to another organisation. Success can sometimes depend on the timing and circumstances of the organisation – there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come! Organisational problems usually have multiple causes as well as multiple symptoms, and the laws of unintended consequences certainly apply when an intervention is applied to just one part of the problem.
The challenge for leaders (and consultants) is to decide which solutions might be applicable within their unique organisation and environment, and to develop an approach to bring about change and embed it within the organisation’s business operations. Developing a high performing, sustainable organisation with high levels of client and staff satisfaction is a goal worth striving for!
About the author
Jenifer has been a consultant and Director of Alliance Consulting Group for more than 22 years, and has successfully delivered outstanding client outcomes on assignments for Commonwealth, State and Local Government clients. Prior to that, Jenifer was Assistant Auditor-General in the Queensland Audit Office (QAO), with responsibilities for Corporate Services, and an Audit Portfolio. She recently joined Proximity as an Expert Advisor. With expertise across Financial Management, Business Operations and Program Management, Human Resources, and Governance, Jenifer has completed consulting projects in Workforce Strategy, Learning and Development, Organisational Performance, Procurement, and Financial Performance. Whilst an SES in the QAO, she carried out longitudinal studies in Organisational Change & Leadership with Dr Carol Dalglish, formerly on the staff of the MBA Program at QUT and co-authored several published papers, one of which was presented at an international Education, Innovation in Business (EDINEB) Conference. Jenifer is an accredited facilitator with Team Management Systems, in Team Management Profiles and the Leader Profile
Notes
[3] The Advantages and Disadvantages of Contingent Workers (verticalbridge.ca)
[4] Kaplan, Robert S.; Norton, David P. “The Balanced Scorecard—Measures that Drive Performance”.
[7] Daniel Goleman “Emotional Intelligence”
[8] Steven Covey “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”
[9] Margerison McCann Team Management Systems
[10] Doran, G. T. “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives”
[11] Peter Drucker “Management by Objectives”
[11]The Leadership Challenge uses case studies to examine “The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership”, as researched and developed by Kouzes and Posner
[12] Steven Covey “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”
[13] The Leadership Challenge uses case studies to examine “The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership”, as researched and developed by Kouzes and Posner
