Posts tagged Gallup

Great Find from Disney!

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Have you ever seen this from Disney?

I know this was the first time I saw it!

On the Gallup Q12, Question #8 asks, “Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?”

I’ve studied the Gallup results and looked at many top performing and low performing companies. There are four things that drive engagement in an organization and mission / purpose is the number one.

If Question #8 is a disagree or strongly disagree, the rest of the survey will follow suit.

However, having a strong mission/purpose is only part of the story. Some organizations have done a phenomenal job identifying a very purposeful mission. Then, they fail to effectively communicate it and their leaders fail to live it.

How is your organization’s engagement around its mission and purpose?

Get the book today:
Overcoming Organizational Myopia:
Breaking Through Siloed Organizations https://www.amazon.com/dp/1945151005/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_p7UXCbNQ4RTBH

Culture, most important aspect of establishing continuous improvement

Meandering Genius Process Improvement

We talk about “culture” all the time and there is often a misconception of what culture is.  According to Gallup, 30% of the US workforce is can be considered engaged in their work.  A Continuous Improvement Culture depends on an employee based that is engaged.  Building and Sustaining and Quality Culture had over twice as many sessions as three of the other theme and focus areas at the recent ASQ Conference, which presents it as one of the most important aspects in quality today.  Continue on my journey with National Graduate School as we explore my Continuous Improvement Culture Model and discuss ways to drive this culture into your organization.

http://ngs.edu/2014/05/08/building-culture-continuous-improvement-culture-building/

Powerful influencer — Jim Clifton

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Readers,

I want to share this morning one of the most powerful influencers I have come across in a long time.

His name is Jim Clifton and he is the CEO of Gallup.

On LinkedIn, he has a regular blog that highlights the problems that not only he sees, but that his companies measures.

His messages are extremely powerful. Please take the time to follow him and read some of his stuff.

Developing Strategic Measures

Incorporating Recurring Measures in Your Assessments

Strategic Planning Think Big

Developing Strategic MeasuresStrategic planning, as a structured and systematic process, is successful when it is leader-led and overcomes the five reasons 70% of all strategies fail.  Learn how to see your plan through to success.  The strategic planning process is where leaders of an organization establish the vision of the organization’s future and then develop and implement the actions necessary to achieve that future.  This article expands on the strategic planning concepts addressed in Think Big, Take Small Steps and is designed to help you achieve success in your strategic planning process.

What Gets Measured, Gets Done — Over and Over Again.

Several weeks ago, I shared with you a tool that I use for organizational assessments in my Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment blog.  In that blog, I told you that I ask, through interviews, for interviewees to rate particular items from 1 to 5.

The reason I structure and write out these interview templates is so that, in a year, myself, or the company, can go back and ask the same questions, or at least a subset of those questions, the same way year-after-year.  Specifically, I want them to ask these 1 to 5 questions again if nothing else.  This is a way to compare the organization’s strategic progress over the years.  This utilizes your DOTMLPF-FREE Assessment as your guiding light over the strategic journey of the organization.

Additionally, when developing the organizational assessment, look for key things that the company measures today and bring that into the assessment.  Do they have a balanced scorecard that they use?  What type of human resource measures do they have, like employee engagement (I recommend Gallup), retirement eligibility and employee tenure, and attrition rates?  Operational volume of services and sales and overall expense, when combined, provide a simple view of average cost per piece for an organization.  Look for the big things you can measure every year or that they already measure.

Tying a company’s strategy to what they measure, or things they should be measuring, helps ensure the success for the strategic plan in the future.  All too often, strategies are created by a single executive or small group of executives who come up with a mission, vision, and goals, in a conference room.  The reality of these are as good as the wordsmithing that occurs to create them.  The purpose of Think Big, Take Small Steps and specifically this whole section on How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment, is to provide the Executable Focus that helps strategies succeed.

Incorporating recurring measures in the organizational assessment at the start provides the organization with a repetitive tool for addressing and measuring strategic progress.  The tendency will be to measure everything and that simply isn’t required.  The company will have lots of measurements that could absorb your time and attention.  Focus only on the few that are important.

For instance, I worked with the Air Force Sergeants Association over the years as a consultant and volunteer.  As a membership organization, their primary focus is providing an Air Force Enlisted Voice on Capitol Hill.  Their mission is only effective if they have a strong membership base.  As a general rule, lobbying associations with less than 100K members tend to be discounted.  Thus, Membership Strength was the most important strategic metric for the association, especially when they hover around 120K.  However, for a long time, they only focused on Membership Recruiting and didn’t really look at the bottom line.  They would be recruiting people by the droves, but on the back end they were pouring out the door faster as their membership expired.  Taking account of Membership Strength, along with Membership Recruiting, Membership Retention, and Membership Loss provides the full strategic picture on the most important factor that the association cares about–Legislative Strength.  Now you they strategically examine what drives recruiting and retention and causes loss for the organization and focus on these activities.  A DOTMLPF-FREE assessment further highlights gaps that might be affecting or preventing the association from being successful.

Part of assessing an organization is to develop recurring measures that give the organization a repetitive tool for addressing and measuring strategic progress.  If you follow my suggested approach with DOTMLPF-FREE, you will automatically create a starting strategic performance measure.  Then focusing on those important few metrics that tell you everything about the organization and are fairly easy to obtain round out the assessment.  Remember, this is strategic…not operational or tactical planning…and you want to focus on strategic measures that lead you to operational and tactical actions.  This provides an executable focus to your plan.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Related Links:

  1. Air Force Sergeants Association: http://afsahq.org/
  2. http://balancedscorecard.org/
  3. http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-measure-your-strategic-plans-success.html
  4. http://www.gallup.com/

Organizational Report Card

Understanding the Different Assessment Tools

Strategic Planning Think Big 6 Comments

Organizational Report CardStrategic planning, as a structured and systematic process, is successful when it is leader-led and overcomes the five reasons 70% of all strategies fail. Learn how to see your plan through to success. The strategic planning process is where leaders of an organization establish the vision of the organization’s future and then develop and implement the actions necessary to achieve that future. This article expands on the strategic planning concepts addressed in Think Big, Take Small Steps and is designed to help you achieve success in your strategic planning process.

Knowing What Assessment Tools Exist is Half the Battle.

Last week, I highlighted several organizational assessment tools in my blog How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment. This will be a relatively short blog, compared to my others, because I just want to highlight some tools and in future articles, I will describe them in more detail. Please Follow My Blog to keep up with this running story. If you want to start at the beginning, check out the linked article in the first paragraph.

The most important thing to do, when conducting an assessment, is to structure your approach. I use an approach that I term DOTMLPF – FREE. This covered the areas of Doctrine, Organization, Training, Material, Leadership, Personnel, Facilities, Finances, Relationships, Efficiency, and Effectiveness. This is a fully rounded approach that allows you to score, evaluate, analyze, and report out an organizational assessment. I will fully cover this tool next in Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment.

When I conduct an organizational assessment, I always use three specific tools: a Stakeholder Assessment, a Change Readiness Assessment, the SWOT Assessment.

  • The Stakeholder Assessment is great for any change-related activity to determine who will be supportive and who will not of the change. It helps to outline what actions you need to take to gain their involve or mitigate their negative influence. Being a certified Prosci practicitioner, I use the ADKAR model for my assessment. All strategic plans, if implemented, result in change, so this is a very helpful tool to prepare for the development and eventual implementation.
  • Additionally, I like to use a Change Readiness Assessment to determine how ready the actual organization is for the upcoming strategic change. This is different than the Stakeholder Assessment, because it looks at change readiness from the organizational point of view. It is very helpful and a relatively short assessment that is easy to perform with a small team.
  • The SWOT assessment, if generally how I report out everything I find from my interviews following the DOTMLPF-FREE format. If you didn’t know, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. As a general rule, I change the word Weaknesses to Challenges–it just goes over better. Most leaders have heard of the term SWOT Analysis from some business class or in the course of their work–seldom do you find anyone who can conduct one. The trick is, that I don’t “conduct” a SWOT Assessment–I assess what I learn about the organization using a SWOT grid and present the results in that manner.

SWOT, in my mind, is a high-level assessment and report. I also assess what I’ve learned from the DOTMLPF-FREE approach through a TIPS Assessment–Trends, Issues, and Problem Statements. What I do, is, using Affinity Diagramming, I build the major TIPS that the organization is faced with. These are also called “Emerging Insights,” which I’ve used in Army Campaign Planning. Under each major issue (defined through the Affinity Diagramming), I provide this general view:

Emerging Insight, Focus Area, or TIP Title
Assessment Observations: Things learned from the research and interviews aligned to this specific area.
Initial Recommendations: Specific recommendations I have, based on the observations, that they need to do to overcome this issue.

When I collect information from my research and interviews, I normally start organizing it in Microsoft Excel under buckets. The beauty of this type of analysis is that it provides the leadership with key areas that they need to work on to make their strategy successful. In many ways, these formulate at least some of the objectives during the facilitated session. Everything else builds to these key items.

You may find use for several other types of assessment and I would love to hear about ones you’ve used, especially if you can share links in the comments below. I love using maturity models for assessing organizations. I’ve even created a specific maturity model when none existed. These models provide a very organized view of the organization’s or domain’s maturity, benchmarks them against industry, and provides a roadmap for them to follow to get better.

Additionally, there are a number of industry specific assessment tools–like a specific assessment to look at non-profits, or assessments to look at finance, information technology, innovation, etc. When you discover a specific (major) challenge with a company, I suggest you research possible assessment tools, or don’t be afraid to create your own. A key point is, normally an assessment tool is nothing more than a structured survey method. All of these assessment tools ask specific questions and the results (answers) formulate the assessment of the organization.

A good example of a powerful assessment tool would be Gallup’s Employee Engagement Survey. This is a widely-use industry standard assessment tool to determine how engaged (or committed) an organization’s employees are. This can be a very helpful assessment and I’ve worked with the results for a couple years now.

Another example, would be ISO 14001–Environmental Management System. For several years, I worked for several EPA and DoD clients in the world of Environmental Management. I used this ISO standard as a key assessment tool for these engagements. This brought a level of professionalism and validity to my work with them, but also gave them something to use year-after-year, much like the Gallup Survey.

The summary of this article, which I expected to be shorter, is that you need to develop a stable of key assessment approaches and tools to analyze and present your analysis in the next phase of the strategic planning effort. You also should be aware of other possible tools for the industry you’re dealing with or tools that can help the organization focus on a specific area. A key factor is that you can overanalyze a situation by bringing in too many tools. Make sure the ones you use are effective and you keep overlap to a minimum. For an example, I use a Stakeholder Assessment and Change Readiness Assessment with every organizational assessment. They both deal with change capability, but they are focused differently and together complement each other.

Stay tuned to future weeks where I will explain some of these specific assessment tools and demonstrate more about how I use them for analysis and for reporting. I will also try to provide at least one example of the tool for your use.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Related Links (find three links related to the topic of the article):

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOTMLPF
3. http://www.gallup.com/

High Performing Organizations

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I’ve been working in some way or fashion in the field of quality consulting since about 1990 when I attended one of my first Total Quality Management courses at Carswell AFB in Ft Worth TX. Since then I have worked in the areas of strategic planning, strategic communication, performance management, process management, human capital planning, resource management, and education and training. I’ve been in the lowest tactical to the highest CEO positions of military, non-profits, and companies and seen many things both doing and consulting in these areas.

So what?

Over the last several years I’ve been really thinking about what makes companies successful. My upcoming book, Overcoming Organizational Myopia is based on a lot of that thought. What I see too much of is organizations looking for that silver bullet. I was in a recent meeting, where a leader said he was looking for that one single metric that when tugged upon it unravelled everything else going on in the organization. My answer would be really simple, that doesn’t exist. Being a top performing (you fill in the blank) takes a lot of work and it’s constant work.

The group I work for now has been extremely successful over the last two years. My boss is even going to be interviewed by Gallup because of their employee engagement success in their last UCount survey. One of the managers in the team commented that now we have to sustain it. My response was, no, now we have to make it better next year. In today’s day and age, sustaining is the death of a company. You have to get better. When I started with them in January of 2012, they had just won The Keepers of Quality award for their major organization. That was great, but there was a lot more they could do. This month, we share part of our two-year continuous improvement story with that sMe audience to discuss how we are building and encouraging an environment of continuous improvement–quality.

What is all this mean?

High performing organizations don’t just “happen.” It takes. Lot of hard work and it’s a constant journey. If you read business books like I do, you probably heard many ways to become that high performing organization. They tell you what it is, they tell you what you should do, and they tell you why. They fill your head with fantastic stores of Apple and Dell, turn arounds like IBM and Harley Davidson, etc. trust me, I have read them all–well a lot of them. The thing they don’t tell you is HOW.

Funny, there are so many How To and Self Help books on the shelf, but none give away the secrets to becoming a great organization. How To books sell too–my speech writing instructor and mentor, Joan Detz taught me that in 2005.

So, how does an organization really improve? That’s the thoughts that have been on my mind of late. My soon to be released book focuses on part of the story, overcoming the “silo effect” that plagues every business in the world. You know what I’m talking about…sand boxes, camps, teams…the way we organize and the way we group as human beings lead us to form silos–we become myopic in business. They problem is that it will ALWAYS happen–you can’t avoid it. Leaders and managers alike might recognize it and try to break it down, but it happens to all of us. Overcoming Organizational Myopia is a true how to book focused on the nine things that suffer in siloed organizations and how to overcome it–not solve it, but to overcome it.

But the key, I think is the “Golden Egg,” as James Farhat would say. That is how does any organization that wants to be high performing make it happen? If they were a car, how do they get their engine firing on all cylinders? That is my journey this year. My effort in 2014 is to not only define it, but to lay out the roadmap and provide holistic training to all, at whatever level they are at, to help them become better and grow.

A guy I worked with in Booz Allen used to comment about how the different teams in our office would fight over the pieces of the “pie.” He was talking about this perceived limited amount of money that was available to all of Booz Allen that we would fight to get a piece of. He believed that believing that the pie was a certain size was limiting our ability to go for more and this we had to take more of someone else’s pie to grow our own silo–back to the myopia view again.

In America today, I think many business look at the perceived pie and think they have to take from others to get a bigger share. That leads us to disruptive innovation, aggressive marketing, and like tactics to win over the market share pie. What if I told you that the pie doesn’t exist. The better you are as a high performing organization, the more people will buy your whatever? I believe that doing good work gets more work–it’s not about pies, but about becoming the best at what you do. This is true both of an organization and as an individual.

So, I leave you with these thoughts on this Tuesday morning. Myopia, pies, and high performing organizations. Let me know what you think. Tell me it can’t be done…that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I look forward to the debate.

For those interested, what does a high performing organization mean to you?