What Makes a Hi-Performing Organization

Organizations need to create higher performing workforce cultures, coupled with a new competency of nimbleness, if they expect to continue creating value for their shareholders. A high- performance organization is one where all departments are in sync, working together, and aligned with each other so as to provide to their customers the very best, on time delivery of your services or products. Anything short of that state of excellence are the results of varying degrees of misalignment. In that reality, expect impacts upon customer loyalty, profitability, process, people, culture and all those other states of being that create loss or create organic growth.

High performance is impossible to achieve so long as there are variability’s in work force performance. Simply stated, departments that are performing at different rates and levels of performance, efficiency and competence, within each of the critical success factor critical to the leader’s declared mission, which results are a touchstone to the customer buying criteria, is a recipe for loss in profitability and /or growth. This is not a trivial matter, as the larger thevariability of workforce performance, the larger the gap between the organizations delivery systems and its customer satisfaction.


What causes variability in workforce performance, within similar workgroups, has been the source of much study but the research that resonates is “among the many variables that discriminate between highly productive workplaces and those that are unproductive, is the quality of the local workplace manager and his or her ability to meet a core set of employees’ emotional requirements.” Primarily, emotional conditions are described as those that meet basic human needs. Buckingham,M & Coffman,C. (1999). First Break all the Rules: What the world’s greatest managers do differently. New York:Simon and Shuster. Coffman, C. & Gonzalas-Molina,G. (2002). Follow this path: How the world’s greatest organizations drive growth by unleashing human potential. New York:Warner.

Not only can that hard evidence of variability of performance can be found in every organization’s cost accounting systems, but each department’s variability of output contributes to the bottom line in uneven contribution. Now we’re addressing performance or engagement of the workforce, but by department, by department, by department. Why does 1 department outperform another? To discover this cause and effect is the “holy grail”.

Each department has their own leader that creates the culture for that department. This local culture may or not be the same culture declared as the corporate way of doing business. It’s that simple.

The solution is having a strong corporate Leader that has the insights, tools, the will, and crystal clear strategy and system that will assist each of the local managers to eliminate performance variability in their respective departments. Easy to say, hard to do; until now.

Here’s the ultimate goal. Each department delivers the best output possibly, focused upon each of the designed, “critical success factors “consistent with the leader’s stated mission. That’s high performance execution strategically linked to profitability. Expect organic growth. Eliminate lop sided delivery. Gets that HEMI engine working on all 8 cylinders! I am not suggesting robotizing the employee organization as that’s trying to regulate humanity. Realistically, it’s both impossible and ill advised to harness people’s human emotion, but performance and workforce efficiency, if managed, hard coded, rewarded and targeted to each of the missions critical success factors, will excite. Thus, this workforce engagement falls squarely on the shoulders of the local manager. This manager engagement falls squarely on the shoulders of the leader.