The Advantage: Organisational Health and the Three Biases
Patrick Lencioni describes organisational health as the single most significant advantage any company can achieve. Despite this, many leaders seem to ignore its importance, even though it’s simple, free and available to anyone who wants it.
This is, quite simply, because many organisations think it is ‘below’ them. They believe they are too sophisticated, too analytical or simply too busy to bother with something they deem as esoteric or ‘touchy-feely’.
The Four Disciplines of Organisational Health
Contrary to popular understanding, organisational health is not related to team-building exercises, employee yoga classes or casual Fridays. It is by no means ‘touchy-feely’, and it encompasses far more than company culture.
In Lencioni’s book The Advantage, he states that the health of an organisation ‘provides the context for strategy, finance, marketing, technology’, making it the ‘single most significant factor [in] determining an organisations success’.
Four disciplines make up the organisational health of a team, which I will be discussing in further length in my next article. These are:
Discipline 1: Building a Cohesive Leadership Team
Discipline 2: Creating Clarity
Discipline 3: Overcommunicating Clarity
Discipline 4: Reinforcing Clarity
However, before companies are able to tap into the power of organisational health, they must first humble themselves sufficiently to overcome the biases that typically stand in the way of truly embracing this concept.
The Three Biases
The Sophistication Bias
Organisational health is such a simple and accessible principle that many leaders overlook it, missing the opportunity to harness organisational health for meaningful advantage. Unlike other aspects of corporate culture, the health of a business does not require high levels of intellect or sophistication, but rather exceptional and persistent levels of discipline, courage and common sense. In an increasingly digitised and complex age, many leaders have come to mistakenly believe that differentiation and measurable improvement can only be found in complexity.
By overcoming the bias towards overly sophisticated and complex solutions, leaders can begin to truly embrace the principles associated with organisational health.
The Adrenaline Bias
The process of becoming a healthy organisation takes time. Unfortunately, we live in an era of instant gratification, where leaders want results, and they want them now. Couple this with what Lencioni describes as chronic cases of ‘adrenalin addiction’, and it can be challenging to get a management group to slow down sufficiently to be able to deal with the issues that while critical in enabling the health of an organisation, may not seem urgent enough to prioritise. While this may seem simple enough, it can take real effort for leaders who are used to living in the fast lane to embrace the adage, ‘you have to slow down to speed up’.
The Quantification Bias
The quantification bias is perhaps the most difficult of the three biases to overcome. This is because the benefits to an organisation of dedicating themselves to becoming healthy, while extremely powerful, can be difficult to quantify in terms of measurable results.
Because organisational health permeates every aspect of a business, it is impossible to isolate any one variable and measure its financial impact in a precise and quantifiable way.
Embracing the concept of organisational health requires a leap of faith from business leaders, a leap, that once taken will pay off in real, tangible ways.
Encouraging a management team to walk to the precipice of uncertainty and jump into the unknown, without a clear picture of what organisational health looks like will prove to be a miraculous feat for any HR leader. So, what exactly is organisational health, and how does a smart company differ from a healthy company?
Great Organisations are Smart and Healthy
Smart organisations are organisations that excel in the classic fundamental principles of business- strategy, marketing, finance, and technology, amongst others. These principles are critical to business success; however, they make up only half the equation.
The other half of the equation is about being healthy.
Healthy organisations will generally display the following attributes:
They have minimal office politics, often due to team members’ ability to trust one another, embrace conflict and accountability and truly commit to group decisions
There is minimal confusion around roles, goals and expected results
The team shows high levels of morale
The business has high levels of productivity, performance and profitability
There is low staff turnover
In next week’s post, I will discuss how your teams can use the four disciplines model to create a smart and healthy organisational culture.
At Infinity HR, we utilise the latest in HR strategies to develop people-first cultures that allow businesses to truly excel in their given field. Contact Iolanda on 0400 489 743 or email iolanda@infinityhr.com.au to discuss how you can take your organisational health to the next level.