The Most Unsexy and Important Element of Business
If you’re like me and you keep up on business trends from places like Inc., Gizmodo, and HBR, then you’re probably familiar with entrepreneurs like Elon Musk who is going to take humans to space in a commercial travel setting or Ashton Kutcher who is a celebrity investor and was an involved in the early stages of popular startups such as Uber and Spotify. These men are incredible professional role models for not only myself but countless other young professionals as well. Both of these men make up the “sexy” side of business in so far as their work is highly publicized and groundbreaking. However, in my experience, this kind of strategy only makes up about 1–5% of the emotional energy or intellectual capital needed to run and maintain a great business. Of course, there will always be a time and place for business leaders to make strategic moves and ground breaking acquisitions in their perspective field but realistically the real work is done when nobody is watching and where the actual work isn’t nearly as flashy. The most important (and unsexy) responsibility for any business leader is to create and strive for organizational health in every aspect of their business.
What is organizational health? Patrick Lencioni, founder and president of The Table Group, has been championing this concept of “Organizational Health” for years. In this book The Advantage, he writes about 200+ pages on this concept. I highly recommend picking up this book. This is really saying something because I normally only read books if they’re on Netflix (Spoiler Alert: There are no books on Netflix). Lencioni’s definition of organizational health is multi-faceted but I think I can streamline it into one sentence. My definition of Organizational Health is when a business takes the time to build a small leadership team who in turn invests in the effort it takes to create clarity of mission, and then commits to both communicating and executing their vision frequently and often throughout their entire organization. Companies that take this approach naturally begin to build a culture that is specific to their mission. As a result, this fosters the type of environment where their people can perform at their peak ability. The thing about Organizational Health is that it doesn’t have explicit metrics that can be measured at a moment’s notice, such as the closing rate of leads in any given sales pipeline. Instead, companies that are healthy begin to develop a slight edge over their competition in ways that pay meaningful dividends over the long run.
Here are just 3 advantages that healthy organizations have over their competition:
Compounded Business Intelligence — Teams within an organization that have clarity around their jobs develop a layer of trust, This layer of trust builds the confidence to point out problems among their team members, even in the midst of conflict, that enables the entire team to be creative and innovative without needing to worry about office politics or turf wars. These types of teams aren’t crippled by the fear of making mistakes. In fact, when mistakes inevitably happen, they use it as an opportunity learn from them and make sure they don’t happen again. The ceiling for this kind of close-knit team is very high which is something that not every organization can boast. “Healthy” is going to out last “smart” in the long haul, especially since being “smart” has now become the starting point in business.
Engaged Leadership — Healthy companies have executive leaders that are invested in the success and well being of the organization without putting personal success ahead of the organization. These types of companies both develop and hire leadership that is strong through their ability to put the team first. Essentially, it’s strength through humility that separates the amateurs from the pros when it comes to leadership. If you don’t have these kind of leaders at your company, then you either need to raise some up at your organization or figure out a new hiring strategy.
Low Turnover Rate Among Linchpins — The healthy organizations are the ones that can retain talent and develop their employees to become the next generation of leadership. Companies that provide their people with clarity around their jobs and raise up managers who provide feedback and affirmation to their team members are the ones that attract the type of personnel upon which you can build the foundation and future of your company. Once you hire the rockstar, they’ll want to stay and be around for a long while especially if you’re the kind of organization that puts their employees first. This quote from Simon Sinek of American Express sums it up for me, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
For me, it’s a shame that more companies aren’t motivated to take the time to invest in their own organizational health. Unfortunately, some people think that these types of principles are too “touchy feely” or that they just have wayyyy too much work to do to take the time to ensure organizational health. The irony of organizational health is that there’s nothing new or special to the principles of implementing good leadership, teamwork, culture, and strategy. When you do the work of maintaining health within your business, it probably won’t get you on the cover of Inc. magazine and I probably won’t read about your exploits in the Harvard Business Review. However, you can be assured that if you keep your business healthy, you’ll have a positive effect on the lives of the people who work at your company. When you think about it, building a healthy organization not only positively impacts the lives of your employees but also helps them become the best version of themselves. This inevitably spills into their personal lives and the lives of their families. Changing lives…in the end, do we really need more motivation than that?
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