Contagious Success

Spreading High Performance Throughout Your Organization

by Susan Annunzio (11600)

To attempt to identify the management behaviors which accelerate profitable growth, an in-depth study of 3,000 knowledge workers around the world was carried out. Although 77% of these respondents claimed they belonged to a high-performing workgroup, only 10% actually belonged to workgroups that generated profitable new products, services or processes. In other words, even the best performing business units could do much better if company leaders could harness the employee brainpower they already have available.

With this in mind, the best way to respond to the changing demands of the marketplace and to succeed in growing is:

• Look inside your organization, identify your high performing workgroups and do everything feasible to enhance their performance.
• Share the secrets of your strongest workgroups with mid-level performers so they can make the step up.
• Spend more time nurturing your high performers and less time cutting workgroups which are performing poorly.
• Grow your business by building and managing your individual workgroups more effectively.
• Don’t fall into the trap of using conventional thinking, but take advantage of workgroup-based reality thinking instead.

Contagious Success