What is keeping your organization from
accomplishing what matters most?
Results vary.
Good people leave.
Change stalls.
Growth creates new problems.
Sometimes the same strategy works in one part of an organization and struggles in another.
What if the problem you're trying to solve
isn't the whole problem?
Performance
Attendance
Retention
Turnover
Quality
Growth
These are outcomes.
What is influencing them?
The answer lies in organizational health.
Organizational health is an organization's ability to function effectively, cope adequately, change appropriately and grow from within.
FUNCTION
COPE
CHANGE
GROW
Three conditions tell us a great deal about an organization's health:
Goal Focus
Do we agree on what matters most?
Cohesiveness
Are we working together to accomplish it?
Adaptation
Can we change when circumstances require it?
WHAT'S GETTING IN THE WAY?
Performance?
Attendance?
Change?
Turnover?
Retention?
Growth?
What if these aren't six different problems?
How do you know?
Leaders know a great deal about their organizations. But experience, observation and intuition don't always reveal the whole picture.
Are you asking people how they feel
—or trying to understand how the organization functions?
MOST ORGANIZATIONS ARE VERY GOOD AT MEASURING WHAT HAPPENED.
What are you measuring that helps you understand what may happen next?
Data can tell you where you are.
It can't change where you're going.
Leadership does that.
When something needs to change, what can a leader actually change?
LEADER REFLECTIONS
The parking lot meeting.
You've just wrapped a meeting. The room was calm — polite nods, no pushback, everyone headed back to work. You read the quiet as agreement.
Later, you spot a few team members deep in an animated conversation in the parking lot. The energy is nothing like what you saw in the room an hour ago
Are you an effective leader or just a messenger?
Then you wonder: how much does each person actually own this decision?
You won't have to wait long for the answer. Just listen to how they talk about it with their own teams.
Granting freedom within boundaries.
How much of your team's day gets swallowed by "Mother, may I?"
Not the big decisions — the small ones. The ones your best people should be able to make on their own, but don't, because they're not sure where the boundaries are.
Here's the counterintuitive part: clear boundaries don't restrict freedom. They create it.
What does a healthy organization actually look like?
Healthy organizations do three things well.
VALUE DATA
LOVE PEOPLE
GROW LEADERS
What happens when healthy practices become part of how the organization operates?
Not one leader.
Not one initiative.
Not one moment in time.
Success becomes less dependent on one
leader, one initiative, or one moment in time.
It becomes sustained.
It becomes systemic.
That is Sustained Systemic Success.
OUR MISSION:
The sustained systemic success of your mission.
BUILT ON MORE THAN FOUR DECADES OF WORK
RESEARCH & MEASUREMENT
Decades of organizational measurement, data and study.
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Working alongside leaders to turn insight into action.
REAL ORGANIZATIONS
Applying the work in schools, businesses, agencies and other organizations.
The tools have evolved. The question has remained remarkably consistent: What makes an organization healthy enough to accomplish what matters most?
What's happening in your organization?
LET'S TALK
NOT READY FOR THAT CONVERSATION?
Continue the conversation about leadership.
Our twice-monthly conversation with leaders explores organizational health, leadership and the conditions that help organizations succeed. Subscribers receive each new conversation first; selected pieces are added to our Insights library over time.
