Creating a Culture of Productivity and Success

When I work with organizations, I focus on helping them create a culture of productivity and success. Here are three areas I go to work on:

Organizing for Unprecedented Results

Organizing for unprecedented results has to do with how people in your organization manage their time and energy, and organize their work and communication with each other. Making a difference in this area requires identifying and implementing new practices that allow your staff to function with increased power and effectiveness in their areas of accountability. Consider the following suggestions for practices of this nature:

1. Establish boundaries to reduce interruptions and elevate productivity. People need to be able to work “concentratedly” without the threat or presence of unnecessary distractions. Working this way creates an environment of respect for people’s time and attention.
2. Schedule interdepartmental meetings that cover pressing needs as well as anticipated needs. Handling tomorrow’s emergencies before they become emergencies requires sufficient planning and foresight.

The result of implementing these types of practices is that people get what they need to get their jobs done well and on time. The experience of being at work shifts from one of constant struggle and fire fighting to one of sufficiency and independent responsibility, where people are ahead of the game and have the room to strategize, improve, and fine tune for better results.

Fostering Participation and Contribution

Organizations are a lot like people. They have their own thoughts, secrets, habits, personalities, and disorders. Creating a culture of participation and contribution starts with acknowledging all the different facets of your organization’s personality, and accepting them as parts of a cohesive whole.

In order to do this, people need an opportunity to communicate what they can’t or don’t accept or acknowledge about their organization’s personality. This type of conversation requires careful facilitation, but the result is that people begin to let go of the judgments, assessments, and resentments that discourage them from participating and contributing.

Examples of organizational personality disorders:

1. Long-term vs. short-term orientation (creates a rift between strategic thinking and results-based thinking, both of which are integral to an organization’s success).
2. Orientation toward survival and emergency (creates a condition of driving for minimal results while losing touch with the organization’s purpose, competitive advantage, and community). How do people behave in an emergency…bodily, mentally, emotionally? How does that way of operating affect their long-term future?
3. Severed head syndrome (the leadership is so detached from the culture of their organization that they have absolutely no idea how their goals and initiatives are perceived).

Leadership for Operational Consistency and Momentum

In the world of results, a state of momentum represents a dependably high level of results from a relatively small amount of effort. Momentum is a function of operational consistency. Operational consistency depends on consistently effective leadership.

The goal of this conversation is to distinguish any gaps in effectiveness at the leadership level and provide the training necessary to close those gaps.

Examples of leadership gaps:

Gaps in employee buy-in and retention

As leaders, one of your jobs is to create pathways that your staff can see clearly and follow readily to fulfill their own initiatives. To have a good idea never go beyond an idea kills morale and contributes to high turnover.

Delegation and training

In highly successful organizations, the flow of tasks and accountabilities starts with the leadership and flows toward the staff. Good leaders know how to delegate tasks to keep the flow moving in the right direction, but successful delegation almost always requires training your staff and expanding their capacities.

Creating an empowering context

Leadership conflicts are often the result of an inadequate context. Do each of the organization’s leaders understand their place in the bigger picture? Are differences of opinion viewed as crucial steps toward organizational development, or do they typically devolve into arguments? Does the leadership know how to capitalize on the strengths of individual leaders and compensate for their weaknesses by providing (and listening to) constructive criticism?

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