What drives sustainable organisational performance?

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has revealed the key to what drives sustainable organisation performance with the publication of its two-year action research and engagement programme.  Tracking the progress of six organisations undertaking change programmes, as well as drawing insight from the 11,000 practitioners in a dedicated network through round table events, polls and online discussions, the research draws conclusions around sustaining performance through both good and bad times.

The research uncovered a number of themes for organisations to focus on in order to successfully implement change and achieve sustainability - ranging from good practice leadership right through to agility and capability building.  Some of these are:

• The organisation’s change response needs to be truly agile and enduring, not a knee-jerk reaction that quickly dissipates: Sometimes when organisations need to change it's easy to confuse a one-off reaction for proactive agility. Organisations should be open to new directions, assess the limitations and risks of existing approaches, and keep moving and adapting.
• Shared purpose can only be achieved by finding the human connection beyond profit or short-term efficiency measures: By encouraging employees to find their own meaning at work, they connect and create a true sense of purpose that goes beyond profits or short-term efficiency measures.
• 'Middle management' have a valuable transforming and translating role but are often bypassed rather than refocused, re-skilled and leveraged: Suitably skilled middle managers play a key role as transformers and translators in bringing change to life. As translators they facilitate two-way communications between leaders and the front line and as transformers they bring change to life.
• Process-heavy organisations are often still insight-light: Overemphasis on backward-looking targets defends existence but doesn't prove worth. Organisations need to cull data that doesn't add value and be curious with the remainder to uncover real insight.
• Leaders don't always know best about the long-term vision: Effective mechanisms for upwards communication - that filter important signals on the ground from the background noise - will inform longer-term planning.

Many of these findings concur with our own experience.  We have delivered many hundreds of “Leading Bold Change” workshops across the world.  The programme aims to connect the hearts and heads of employees within organisations with the real drivers of change for the business.  Leaders in the workshops we run often talk of issues that inhibit this process and that include:

• Too much organisational change is ill thought out, reactive and leads to a “flavour of the month” mentality.
• Often the change is “sold” to employees on the basis of rational and logical analysis.  This approach neglects the emotional and behavioural implications for team members.
• Middle managers are often the “meat in the sandwich” between the top management and the front-line.  However, they lack the investment in communications and leadership capabilities required to fulfill this role effectively.
• There is still an over-emphasis on management rather than leadership skills in organisations.  This leads to a disproportionate value being given to process management skills at the expense of softer/communications capabilities.
• Vision and direction setting is often seen as a one-way cascade from top to bottom.  Rarely are there effective ways to receive feedback or to spread vision communications more “virally and organically”.

Based directly on the work of John Kotter and more specifically the book “Our Iceberg Is Melting”, “Leading Bold Change” enables leaders at all levels within organisations to engage with their teams to help them to make the behavioural changes needed to properly implement and sustain change.  To find out more about Leading Bold Change, please visit www.leadingboldchange.co.uk.