In the marketplace today, every company is trying to be more effective than ever to support continued growth and profitability. This is even more of a challenge with the re-inventing of what and where work gets done. The days of everyone working at the office and communicating with team members as they walk up and down the hallways may not be the norm in another 3 years. So how does a company or institution create a culture of high performers? They must begin with facing the challenges of:

• Doing more with less resources
• Adapting to meet changing market and business needs
• Scaling operational effectiveness of processes and offerings
• Attracting, engaging, and retaining their future leaders
• Creating a desirable place to have a career, not just a job

High-preforming companies are admired for that fact that they have successfully choreographed all the steps, decisions, and timed movements to create an engaged workforce that is designed to support the business outcome envisioned by its leaders. Gemini+ Plus is a trusted guide to many of these top performing companies by first diagnosing the current state of their business using a proprietary 15-dimensional model that cover all aspects of the organization including process, technology, people, and strategic goals. Leveraging the insights gather from the discovery, Gemini+ works with the organization to design a plan that includes recommendations spanning application architectural design, operational processes, and skill and task analysis all of which follow a specifically design sequence and implementation timeline.

Finally, Gemini+ provides architectural and development expertise to that utilizes strategic plans and insights coming from the discovery and recommendation process to develop a personalized technology and content solution in support of creating a culture of high-performing engaged employees.

This process and methodology allow the Gemini+ team of developers and content creators to connect their daily work with their personal understanding of the holistic solution and current state of the business, drastically decreasing that chance of misaligned efforts or solutions.

When organizations are small, it is fairly easy to maintain organizational effectiveness, as the business is usually less complex and the workforce is more manageable.  At this point, there is a surplus of what we would call “organizational margin” or “organizational capacity” that enables a company to absorb minimal growth and not overtax the functional areas.  As organizations grow, the business tends to become more complex, systems are required, and the people dimension is more difficult to manage.

The natural tendency is to leverage the workforce to absorb the growth.  Often, companies do not recognize the pain the workforce is experiencing within the organization until it is too late.  Pain such as disgruntled workers, disengaged workers, turnover, and drop in customer sentiment start to increase until eventually there is a stall or even worse a reduction from the previous growth levels.  When the symptoms related to a reduction in organizational margin start to surface, there is often an executive bias that is created.  How many times have you heard an executive say “what, nothing is wrong, look at our sales?”  This is when the leadership should take a hard look at the organization and begin asking the hard questions.

The six areas of the organization to begin asking the hard questions (hint: I save the best one for last!) are as follows:

Leadership – are we developing and training leaders within the organization to support and grow with the brand?  Have we properly communicated our “why”, our core values and behaviors?  Are the core values and behaviors of leadership being monitored, measured, exhibited, and rewarded?  Are they celebrated?

Finance – are we investing in the right things to further the organizations growth?  Do we understand our true cost?  Are we aligned with operations and human resources?

Operations – are the operations aligned with the business development, finance, and strategy of the organization? Are we too complex in our business model?  Does human resources/talent acquisition have a clear understanding to our future people’s needs? Skills?

Infrastructure – is the infrastructure stable? Is it set-up to foster the right kind of dialog across functional areas as well as support the contextual work environments of our employees?  Do our systems provide the right data?  Are we able to get to the data in an insightful and meaningful way?

Business Development – are our efforts supportive of the agreed upon strategy?  Is operations and finance aligned on supporting and delivering our efforts?  Do we measure the right activities?

People – do we have the right people in the right positions and developed to be successful?  Do we understand the behavioral typography for success in our key positions? Are there career paths for the employees to understand their opportunities?  Are we managing our people as carefully as we are managing our other assets?  How are we actively dialoging with our people?  Does every person understand what we do, why we do it and where we are going?  Does compensation and benefits support what is important to the organization’s future along with what is important for our people? What’s our turnover? Do we know the cost of our turnover? How deep is our bench strength?  Do we have the right people metrics, and can we accurately measure them? Etc. etc. etc.

Increasing a company’s organizational effectiveness can seem like a difficult prospect.  To not address the effectiveness is a much more daunting reality. By having a plan and being intentional, you can increase your organizational effectiveness.

As a leader have you ever wondered why your message does not reach the end of the organization? If you have, welcome to the club. The issue is that the original “Why” gets lost in the cultural telephone game and changes as it moves down through the company. Ultimately, the values and behaviors that drive the experience for the associates and the customer are never heard or seen. What does that look like? In the case of retail, have you ever been a fan of a location but not the brand itself? It is hard to grow a company that has a brittle and diverse set of micro-cultures. Here are some ideas to start exploring to help Your “Why” stay the Why.

1. The message with the most air-time is the one that gets heard. As a CEO or Senior leader, make sure to keep your message front and center to your direct reports.
2. Use multiple channels to communicate. Just because you said it once in a weekly call does not mean that it was heard or prioritized the way you think it should be. If you were running for public office, where would you show up, what would you say, who would you be with, etc.? Be visible and available to different parts of the organization.
3. Create clear metrics that balance relationship and results for the organization.  As a message makes it further into the daily operations narrative it can be overshadowed by the message of pure results. If it is all about numbers, employees will think they have become one.
4. Celebrate and promote stories of the brand throughout the organization. Everyone loves a good story and more importantly they want to be part of one.
5. Stay true to who you are. Today, anyone can spot something that is inauthentic. If you try to be everything to everybody, then you are just moving your company into a popularity contest where you don’t really know who is loyal to your brand. If you hold true to your values, behaviors, and narrative you may have some loss but what you gain will solidify and grow your brand ambassadors.

Building a culture can be difficult, but it does not mean that there isn’t a recipe you can follow. Always remember, leaders drive culture, culture drives engagement, engagement drives results.