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Imagine…

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An organisation where:

  • people on the frontline make operational decisions that help to better serve customers
  • pressure to perform comes from peers and a sense of shared purpose rather than from a boss
  • teams, not managers, decide who to recruit
  • everyone knows what everyone else earns – and what they do to earn it
  • where ‘top’ pay is limited to 20 times average salary (the norm in private sector if 400 times!)
  • employees think of it as a community on a mission to make a difference in the world, rather than a employer
  • mission matter as much as the bottom line – and BOTH matter a lot
  • every employee feels that they are running their own small business and takes day to day decisions accordingly

What could you do to make your organisation more like this?

Would the effort be rewarded?

Using the Right and Left Brain at Work

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Most organisations are designed to maximise the contribution of employees left brains to the pursuit of success. Targets are set, plans are laid, logic is deployed, progress is measured and accountability is maintained. Such ‘left brain’ activities fit nicely the milieu of meetings, time pressures, deadlines and procedures that form the social system of most organisations.

However most of us choose an employer based on ‘right brain’ criteria in pursuit of ‘right brain’ goals.

  • Will the work be fulfilling?
  • Will I part of a great team?
  • Will my efforts help to make the world a better place?
  • Will the job give me a lifestyle that works for me?

It is the ‘right brain’ that is the seat of creativity, imagination, innovation and passion. Unless we build a social system that feeds, stimulates and enables right brain contributions we should continue to expect as many as 1 in 4 of our employees to be looking to leave in the next 12 months, while 2 of the remaining three will be in survival (‘count the years, months and days until I retire’) mode.

Take a quick audit of your social system (meetings, processes and procedures) at work. How many opportunities in the average week are there for meaningful ‘right brain’ conversations that are likely to lead to the successful pursuit of right brain goals?

Of course it is easy for our left brains to rationalise away this paucity of ‘right brain’ opportunity in the name of efficiency and the pursuit of effectiveness. To overcome this tendency just remind your left brain of the critical importance of enabling good people to do great work, and of the need for frequent and regular innovation and renewal, if your organisation is to survive never mind thrive in the next few years.

You may find that it gives your right brain just enough time and space to do some big picture thinking.

Goals, Priorities and Resources; where does it all go wrong?

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Spending time developing and clarifying goals is rarely time wasted. Although some of us spend time clarifying our work goals few of us spend time developing goals for other important aspects of our lives – family, community and self. This is one of the reasons why we find work-life balance so hard to achieve. Goals that have been set in our professional lives are not balanced by goals in other areas. The goals that we have set start to demand creativity and resources and before we know it…

Sometimes we set goals that do not provide clear priorities. Or they provide us with so many priorities that we may as well have no priorities at all. Priorities are immediate next steps that will move us closer to our goals. Good priorities are ones that we cannot fail to address. They are so simple and appealing that they cry out for us to get on with them.

But often we forget to allocate time and other resources to our priorities. Without resources to go with them our priorities are worthless. Without doubt time is the most precious resource that we can commit to a priority. I often find myself working with senior managers to clarify goals and priorities (no more than three or four at a time) and then schedule time in busy diaries to spend on them.

By scheduling two 90 minute blocks of time every week to work on priorities many managers ‘magically’ start to make tangible progress towards goals that had previously frustrated them.

Building a High Performing Team – Part 1 – The Same Page

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The first stage in building a high performing team is to get everyone on the same page.

Every team member must master the basics of organisational performance:

  • What are we here to achieve and how do we recognise success?
  • What are our markets and how do we segment them?
  • Who are our customers and what are their buying patterns?
  • Who would we like our customers to be – and why aren’t they buying from us now?
  • Who is our competition and what are they doing?
  • What drives or inhibits our ability to deliver on the mission?

In high performing teams each team member is able to answer these questions – not just from their own perspective but from a collective team perspective. There is a shared analysis that provides a platform for coherent action.

In mediocre teams the members can usually answer these questions from their own siloed perspective. However there is little or no shared analysis and the actions that flow from each silo at best lack coherence and at worst compete with each other for resources and prestige.

Getting everyone on the same page is best done through a group session that has sufficient openness, candour and respect to ensure that the all of the ‘elephants in the room’ are recognised and addressed.