(11601) Susan Annunzio says:
To grow your business, narrow your focus. Get to better understand your top-performing workgroups and do everything feasible to better leverage what those top workgroups do. Replicate those workgroups by helping the mid-level performers perform better. That way you can spread success throughout your entire organization and maximize the amount of creative thinking that takes place. This is the path to growth.
1. Workgroups are the “engine rooms” for organizational growth.
Every company or organization has workgroups of various sizes. A workgroup may have just a few people in it, or it may have hundreds or thousands. Some organizations form workgroups along functional lines, others use product groupings or geographical areas. Workgroups can be permanent or temporary. A workgroup is the basic unit responsible for generating measurable results in an organization.
The leaders of your own organization probably think of it conceptually as a series of individual workgroups, each of which needs to be handled differently. Some of the workgroups are probably stand-out performers, while others under-perform. In fact, in the study of 3,000 knowledge workers, the global distribution of workgroups was:
High performing: 10%
Average performers: 52%
Non-performing: 38%
The way workgroups are managed is evolving rapidly. In the industrial era, the assembly line and economies of scale were the fuel of corporate success. In those circumstances, top-down command-and-control hierarchies worked well. Business decisions were reasonably straightforward, competitors were well defined and obvious, and it wasn’t necessary for workers to think creatively – all they had to do was follow directions.
In today’s marketplace conditions, however, the old industrial era business model is less effective. Today, markets are saturated with alternative offerings, capital is scarce, many industries have been consolidated and products are fast becoming commoditized. Businesses have to work harder to meet the customer’s needs. To be sustainable, companies have to keep cutting costs and exhibiting operational excellence. Workers cannot simply follow the orders of the business leaders but must use their own brainpower and creativity to come up with enhanced products and offerings. Leaders don’t have all the answers, and can’t be everywhere at once, so they have to rely on the combined brainpower of all employees to come up with new service ideas, new product concepts and new marketing ideas. In just the same way as the power has shifted from sellers to the customer, power in many organizations has also moved from the senior management team to the workgroups that actually get things done. It is at the workgroup level that the best new ideas of the future will come.
2. To increase workgroup performance, enhance the environment
The single factor that is most critical to the creation of a high-performing workgroup is to create the right environment. Every workgroup is a product of its environment. To sustain profitable growth, create a business environment where:
Your people feel valued.
People feel like they can do quality thinking.
Everyone feels they can create and seize opportunities
The fastest and most effective way for any organization to achieve growth is to focus on increasing the performance of your organization’s best performing workgroups. Put differently, if you can progressively enhance the environment in which your best workgroups operate, they will just naturally grow and expand.
To foster a high-performance environment:
Put in place leaders who are completely open about themselves – someone who will work to create the optimum environment for the workgroup and who doesn’t feel the need to be in the middle of everything micromanaging. Good leaders need to know their own strengths and weaknesses and rely on others to compensate where they are weak.
Use 360-degree feedback – where the workgroup members evaluate the leader as well as being evaluated by him or her themselves. Good evaluations should be based on observable behaviors rather than personal opinions.
Offer amnesty to those who bring up “unspeakable” ideas – so that everyone knows they can speak the truth without fear of repercussion. Often, people feel they might be punished for telling the truth. Remove that fear to enhance the environment. Encourage people to be respectful in what they say and assume good intent, but if there are problems in the logic being applied, encourage people to speak out.
Encourage more collaborative thinking – so that the entire workgroup will own the solutions to problems which get developed. To enhance collaboration:
- Allow team members to vent their feelings.
- List all the implicit assumptions which have been made.
- Get people to think by reversing those assumptions.
- List all the implicit assumptions that have been made.
- Get people to think by reversing those assumptions.
- List all creative ideas which get suggested.
- Highlight the smart ideas and look for any recurring patterns.
- Pinpoint any potential dangers – what could go wrong.
- Develop an action plan to move forward.
Play to the individual strengths of the workgroup members – and pass the ball to the person who can do the most with the idea. When everyone in the group understands what they do best and what others can do well, the right job can be assigned to the right person so everyone benefits. This is smart teamwork. It’s also the way the whole can be greater than the sum of the workgroup’s parts. It’s also a great idea to regularly invest in training and upgrading the skills of the workgroup members so that future high performance can be achieved.
3. Create processes by which workgroups can share their secrets
Ideally, you want to spread high performance principles and practices throughout your entire organization. There are two basic approaches to this ideal:
1. You can deliberately attempt to create a company-wide environment where high-performance workgroups can flourish.
2. You can develop sound and repeatable processes by which your existing high-performance workgroups teach all the other workgroups how to increase their performance.
It may even make sense to try both approaches in parallel and simultaneously. Some ideas that have worked for high-performing workgroups and that may be worth considering for your own circumstances and situation are:
Make sure there is support from th3e top – that your corporate and group leaders are all on the same page when it comes to doing whatever is required to support high performance.
Hire smart people, set them goals but leave the how up to them – being careful to provide enough information so good decisions can be made. Also, you want to actively encourage people to take risks by making it clear they will not be punished for failure when making an attempt to move forward.
Encourage people to make decisions quickly – and reward those who come up with good ideas, regardless of their position in the company.
Value collaboration highly – by creating an environment where your best people enjoy working with each other to achieve something substantial and noteworthy. Your compensation system needs to reflect this ideal rather than simply rewarding those who grab control and attempt to take credit for the entire workgroup’s input.
Put your front-line people first – and make it clear everyone else in the organization is there to support those who interact directly with customers. Replace bureaucracy with greater teamwork.
Treat your people with respect – so they will treat your customers with professionalism. Focus on excellence and create an environment in which people are encouraged to think for themselves.
4. Understand the three drivers of high workgroup performance.
High performing workgroups attract the best talent because ambitious people want to be where they can do their best work. They also want to feel like they’re making a difference to the company. Ideally, top performers want to be in an environment where they can work hard and be rewarded for their superior performance.
Specifically, there are three key drivers of high performing workgroups. These workgroups:
Value people, Optimize critical thinking, Seize opportunities
1. Value People
That is, they create an environment where smart people are actually treated like they can think for themselves. Employees are told what the organization’s goals are and then left to decide for themselves how best to go about achieving those goals. More to the point, managers specify the group’s objectives and then get out of the way. Managers then get referred to only when the group needs resources.
Note that in this kind of environment, a healthy level of robust debate should exist. People should passionately advocate what they consider to be the best way to move forward. Others may disagree, but there should exist a healthy respect for the contribution of others. In high performing workgroups, people feel challenged and inspired to do their very best work.
2. Optimize Critical Thinking
Critical thinking means to draw logical conclusions from complex information and decide how to use that information to achieve specified objectives. To be able to think critically, the people in high performing workgroups need to be provided with enough information to do their best work.
Critical thinking also means to separate the facts of a situation from the emotions. There needs to be consistency between what people say and what they do. There also must be a leader who will “run interference” for the workgroup – that is, a leader who will protect the workgroup from the rest of the organization. With this type of leader in place, a high performing workgroup can focus on getting the job done rather than getting enmeshed in internal politics, etc. The leader should also have the ability to secure a workable budget for the workgroup, lobby for the necessary equipment and if necessary change the corporate rules.
3. Seize opportunities
High performing workgroups generate a learning environment where people can generate new ideas, take risks, try things out and learn by making mistakes. The foundation for this kind of environment is continual learning and experimentation.
Many opportunities to grow revenues for an organization arise as a side-effect of trying something else. Unless people feel like they have some latitude, there won’t be much of a culture of taking risks. The higher the workgroup’s tolerance for failed attempts, the more people will feel empowered to try new things – which is what you want.
High performing workgroups have a knack for turning problems into opportunities. They encourage risk taking by publicly recognizing the people who make an extraordinary effort, irrespective of whether things went to plan or not. This is the only way employees will seize on good ideas as they come up.
5. To grow, move mid-level workgroups to high-level performance
The best way to enhance the overall performance of any company is to find ways to move some of the average performing workgroups into the high-performance bracket. Typically, if you can bring just a few of your average performers to the next level, you’ll double the number of high performing workgroups in your company.
High performing: 10% becomes 20%
Average performers: 52% becomes 42%
Non-performing: 38% unchanged
Focusing on transforming the workgroups in the middle – those that get a few things right but not everything – makes much more sense than eliminating the weakest workgroups. It’s impossible to cut your way to success. Eliminating the non-performers doesn’t help you develop new products, services or markets, which is what is required to grow the enterprise. Moving the mid-level performers is also more realistic and most effective than attempting to transform the entire company, which will require substantial time and money to achieve.
Moving the mid-level groups can generate dramatic improvements in company performance. The process is also manageable – it can be scaled up or down as appropriate. Even better, most of these types of initiatives can be internally driven – there will be no need to bring in expensive outside consultants as would usually be required if you’re attempting to do a company-wide transformation.
So how, exactly, do you upgrade the mid-level performers and move them into the high-performance category?
1. Go through and identify all of your organization’s high-performing and average-performing workgroups.
2. From the average performers, choose the top 20-percent – based on criteria that make sense to your situation, such as:
Performance to accepted metrics of success.
Importance of the results to the company’s revenues.
The greatest potential for growth.
The group’s internal environment.
3. Match an average-performing team with a high-performing workgroup – based on common functions, goals, clients or other types of affinities.
4. Create a SWAT team – which will be made up of representatives from both the high-performing and the average-performing workgroups. A good SWAT team will have eight to ten members who have credibility with their coworkers and a demonstrated track record of success. Set aside time on a regular basis for the SWAT team to get together and identify problems, set goals and develop joint solutions to the problems encountered in upgrading the mid-level workgroup. A member of the company’s senior management will also need to be available to act as an advocate for the SWAT team as required.
5. Let the SWAT team go to work on enhancing the average performing workgroup – by running various projects where members of both workgroups collaborate. Ideally, the SWAT team will come up with alternative ideas nobody else has thought of because they can bring a fresh perspective to bear. Draft other people into the SWAT team from throughout the organization on an as-needed basis. The SWAT team should meet regularly until its goals are achieved and then quarterly to ensure the results are sustained long-term.
6. Tell the story of what’s happening – through both formal and informal channels. Encourage the SWAT team members to share their experiences throughout your organization. Hold meetings where they can discuss what’s been achieved and solicit more suggestions. Make the SWAT team into a teaching team by sharing both the successes and the failures. Tell the story of how things have really unfolded rather than letting some myth about what’s going on take root. The more honest and open you can be, the better.
In essence, moving the middle revolves around the use of internal change agents. The people who make up the SWAT team look at the environments of the average performers and upgrade them. That change effort, in turn, swells the ranks of the high performers with all the flow-on benefits that will generate.
Contagious Success