How Smart & Healthy is Your Organisation?

As a leader, do you sometimes feel stuck and despite the best efforts, you don't see progress? You might focus too much on being smart. Successful organisation focus on being smart and healthy.

I like to illustrate this as a train representing the delivery to the customers (smartness). And the tracks (healthiness) are supporting the train to run smoothly.

According to Patrick Lencioni it is easy to be smart; and many companies struggle to become healthy.

How does it feel at the top of an organisation? Many people agree that it is "cold and lonely" up there. Strong signs that the top leadership team is unhealthy and not effective!

In his book, The Advantage, Lencioni argues that lasting success for an organisation is based on how healthy they are. Let's have a look at some of the highlights for the path towards a healthy organisation.

It starts at the top. And the aim is to create a cohesive leadership team; a strong team that works closely together towards a common goal - a highly effective team. I feel we should put a strong emphasis on this, because at the top it is often "cold and lonely". Where do we start? The foundation for cohesiveness is trust, which comes from a good understanding of each other. I like the term connectedness in this context: the leadership team should feel connected beyond daily work topics. Based on this trust, we can go to step two: being able to address and resolve conflict. Especially here in Asia (though I observe this in many Western cultures as well), people tend to focus on harmony and are polite with each other. To build cohesiveness, we need to go beyond that and address conflict - with courage and respect. With being connected and courageous we can then climb the pyramid of effectiveness.

The cohesive leadership team can then start to answer some of the critical questions. They aim to bring clarity - for themselves and for the rest of the organisation. Why do we exist (vision)? How do we behave (values)? What do we do (business model)? How will we succeed (strategy)? These are the core questions which lead to clarity and establish the foundation to daily decision making.

In order to build organisational health, we need to start at the top, with Team Number One. Only then can we propagate cohesiveness and clarity throughout the organisation. With this healthiness we want to encourage ownership, experimentation and open communication. How can we propagate the values and behaviours? Through people and through structure. The structure can take the form of OKRs - the goal setting activity that supports the translation from vision to action. And we can weave in our values into our working principles, our codex of our way of working. This structure supports the propagation of values, cohesion and clarity.

A healthy organisation is limited when its people are not healthy. Therefore I encourage an organisation to support their people to become and stay energetic; this comes from movement, nutrition, mindfulness and being compassionate with oneself. This energy is then the foundation of drive.

How have you experienced organisational health?


Reference: The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni