Strong organisations do a number of things consistently well. We have taken these things and built them into our Organisational Strength Test.
Some elements, for example Purpose, Strategy and Leadership are self-evident. Most organisations will focus on these to some extent.
Clarity of purpose and supportive environments can receive less attention but provide essential organisational foundations
Behaviours that promote openness and engagement support an organisations ability to problem solve and ultimately outperform competitors.
All of these things contribute to and build culture.
High performance organisations rely on culture for momentum. Culture is a double edged sword.
Strong culture can amplify purpose, leadership, clarity, workplace health and collaboration.
Poor culture will erode leadership’s efforts to drive the business forward.
We believe that culture is predictable and can be measured. More importantly, we believe there are practical steps that can be taken to move culture in the right direction.
Once the foundations are in place (and they don’t need to be complex) culture will start to become powerful and purposeful. This change will gain momentum and will become unstoppable.
Powerful and purposeful culture will amplify the efforts of leadership to set purpose and strategy. Rather than fighting against poor culture, leadership can rely on organisational culture as a powerful allied force.
Leadership is the singularly decisive component of organisational strength. You are probably very focused on your leadership. What about the leadership of your team? Is it aligned? We believe in the principles of Servant Leadership, and we build that into our programs.
1. Person of character:
2. Puts people first:
3. Skilled communicator:
4. Compassionate collaborator:
5. Has foresight:
6. Systems thinker:
7. Leads with moral authority.
Most organisations will have a purpose and strategy. What varies is the quality of strategy and clarity of the purpose.
Whether stated or not all organisations will have values. Where these are not stated, unwritten or informal values will emerge. These are not always the values we envision, want or need.
Below are the Purpose, Strategy and Values of my organisation. We can help you articulate a powerful purpose, purposeful strategy and an enabling value set.
Many large organisations struggle with role clarity. For SME, it is easier because organisations are flatter and less complex, but ambiguity can still exist. Job descriptions might help but won’t completely solve this.
We use RASCI to provide role clarity and RAID (Bain & Co.) to define decision making.
Organisations that have strong leadership and are clear about their purpose and the roles of their people have the foundations for good organisational health.
Organisations that are mindful of the health of their people as well as the health of their. organisation build powerful teams. A strong program of non-discrimination and anti-harassment, an environment that allows people to bring their whole self to work, and programs that manage workplace stress all promote health in the workplace.
Deep and ongoing collaboration provides a number of components. We have a number of tools that can help your teams work better together.
We can use DiSC profiling to help your team members better understand themselves and others. DiSC also allows us to understand the behavioural preferences of the team as a whole and allows us to understand potential gaps and blind spots.
Organisational change can be very difficult without a plan. Below is a change model introduced by John Kotter over twenty years ago. It is intuitive and it works.
We can help you manage organisational change through this well respected framework.