Thought-Starters for Building Organizational Health

- From the kitchen table of Michael Legut, Ph.D.

Why Do Geese Fly In A “V”   

Key Takeaways. 

• Organizational and team health can be observed in outcomes like high morale, increased productivity, employee retention, goal clarity and internal politics. 
• Building a healthy and successful team involves understanding the true talents of team members and then finding the right work to fit those talents. 
• Interpersonal behaviors such as trust, healthy conflict, accountability, commitment to decisions and attention to results, all provide clues to team and organization health.
• Developing insight to your interpersonal behavior is about embracing self-reflection. 
• Self-reflectivion is useful for understanding how your own mindset can influence your leader behaviors and your team’s behaviors. 

When geese migrate they typically fly in the “V” formation. They have a long journey and the birds know how to work together to survive this journey. The story of why geese fly in a “V” is a useful metaphor when we think about leaders, teams and organizations. The journey of all organizations is to pursue profit, survivability and their mission. With the recession looming, business leaders must make strategically competitive decisions and investments that deliver revenue and/or community value. Some of those decisions will be about leadership talent and team performance. While geese travel their journey by instinct, business leaders and teams must consider many human issues that impact decisions about how to achieve their goals. The purpose of this blog series will be to outline some strategies leaders can use to address the leadership talent, team performance and survivability of their organizations. In this journey, I will look at ways to manage individual talents and understand how interpersonal relationships can enhance team functionality. Our approach will be to synthesize the work of several thought-leaders to explore various strategies for creating organizational health solutions.

What Is Organizational Health?    Let’s start by stating the obvious. Employees are important to a company’s success or failure. Interpersonal and team behaviors can help or hinder that success. While it is true that many factors can contribute to a company’s success, businesses often overlook how employee and team behaviors impact organizational health. So what is organizational health?

• Organizational health can be observed in outcomes like high morale, increased productivity, employee retention, goal clarity and internal politics. Many management thought-leaders suggest that healthy organizations tend to have motivated, innovative, trustworthy and capable employees. Lencioni’s recent work - The Six Types of Working Genius – provides strategies that teams and organizations can use to become healthier.

• Lencioni proposed that unique individual talents, related to Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity, are the basic talents needed for all types of team work. Aligning tasks to fit the unique talents of team members can certainly improve project success and promote healthy team work.

• Building a healthy and successful team involves understanding the true talents of the person and then finding the right work to fit those talents. A team that is misaligned with one or more talents may struggle to achieve optimal performance.

When individual talents are aligned to the right work, employees often describe their jobs in terms of the joy, energy and the fulfillment they get from doing the work. In future blogs, I will explore how to identify and engage these unique individual talents to build healthy and successful teams.

Leader Behavior Contributes To Healthy Culture    The health and well-being of a company can often be observed by looking at how individuals, especially leaders, behave and think as they engage in their work activities.

• Much has been written about leadership behaviors (i.e. Servant Leadership) and how that behavior shapes team behavior and the organization’s culture. In his book The Five Dysfunction of a Team, Lencioni identified leader and team behaviors that influence team health and the company culture.

• Behaviors such as trust, healthy conflict, accountability, commitment to decisions and attention to results, all provide clues to team and organization health. While I will discuss this more in future blogs, one thing is clear, to manage organization health, leaders must understand how their leadership mind-set and behaviors influence the behavior of their teams, the company culture and the organization’s health.

Self-Reflection Helps   Leaders can advance organizational health of their companies by having the right people in the right roles, and aligning their strongest talents to work that is meaningful and fulfilling. However this requires that leaders become very people-centric in their behaviors and mind-set.

• Leaders must take an empathic approach to understanding their team. With this in mind, it also seems important for leaders to develop insights to their own interpersonal skills, and apply that learning to improve the health and capabilities of their teams and organizations.

• A recent analysis of C-Suite skill requirements from Russell Reynolds Associates, suggested that specific social capabilities, such as a high level of self-awareness, the ability to listen, and being thoughtful about how their words and actions will play out beyond the immediate context, are emerging as important leader capabilities. While companies still value C-suite executives with traditional administrative and operational skills, there is a growing demand for leaders who also demonstrate highly developed interpersonal skills.

One aspect of developing insight to your interpersonal behavior is the ability to embrace self-reflection. Why is leader self-reflection an important skill? 

• Self-reflection helps leaders see issues from their personal past which trigger behaviors that influence team members. In his book on Positive Intelligence, Shirzad Chamine provides tools and activities to guide self-reflection and manage the self-talk that can trigger negative - Saboteur - and positive – Sage - behaviors.

• This self-reflective insight can be extremely useful for understanding how your own mindset can influence your leader behaviors and your team’s behaviors. There is much more that will be explored on this topic in future blogs for this series. For now, it is useful to know that self-reflection can help leaders manage behaviors which influence their teams and the company culture.

At this point, you may feel either more confused or more confident about your leadership style. Hopefully you will want to read more. This blog series is meant to be a journey that will provide some tips and thought-starters for leaders so they can find solutions to improve the health of their organizations. For many leaders, the future blogs will confirm things they are already doing. For others, the ideas many not fit with how they think about their leadership. Regardless, as you read this series, I want to help plant a seed for you to consider personal or team changes to help promote organizational health in your company.

As always my goal is to help leaders understand how to improve their leadership skills, build effective work teams and contribute to their organization’s health. I can be reached at www.leaderimage.com or on my LinkedIn page.