Business

Strategy Call

Book an obligation free Strategy Call with Gary Ryan here

How to achieve the results you desire

When performance lacks, frustration grows. Are you frustrated by a lack of cohesiveness within your organisation, department or team?

Do you wonder what you really could achieve if you could only work together?

Are you sure that there must be a better way to work together but you just haven’t found it yet?

If you want to discover the answers to these three questions keep reading.

Implications of under-performance

Quite simply under-performance affects your bottom line. Reports have indicated that communication problems cause over 50% of workplace inefficiencies. The sources of these inefficiencies include:

  • A lack of clarity about what the organisation, department or team is trying to achieve
  • Poor and ineffective leadership
  • The inability of talented people to work together in teams
  • The openness of the organisation’s culture to accept Truth to Power
  • The low occurrence or truly engaging workplace conversations
  • The provision of poor internal service
  • Poor strategy execution
  • The myth that one person (usually a leader) can solve all problems

What’s possible

Under-performance does not have to be accepted. The results you desire can be achieved by implementing all or a combination of the following six strategies for success:

  1. Conduct Strategic Conversations to engage your people in where you are going and how you will get there
  2. Create a culture of Service Excellence that permeates your team, department and/or organisation
  3. Discover the practices of Leadership That Matters
  4. Learn the fundamentals of effective Workplace Communication
  5. Create Teams That Matter to deliver what matters where it counts
  6. Create a Flexible Workplace that enhances the engagement and commitment of your people.

You have the capacity to learn to implement some or all of these strategies yourself. You wouldn’t be in your role if you couldn’t. Your problem is time. Every minute of every day that your team, department or organisation is not performing to its potential you are losing valuable resources that could be used to bring your vision to life.

The solution – engage an expert

We are expert in each of the six strategies for success. We are even more expert in understanding how to integrate the six strategies for success for you and your circumstances. Every team, department and organisation is different, so it is our expertise in understanding how to integrate some or all of the six strategies for success that is what will save you time and quickly create performance benefits for you.

Our solutions include both in-person and online, bespoke programs.

What value would only a small performance improvement bring to your team, department or organisation (let alone your personal reputation)? Imagine if that improvement could be bigger rather than smaller. It can be! It is possible.

You may already be implementing some of the six strategies for success. We will assess and identify what needs to be done and work with you in implementing the integration of new strategies with your existing ones.

Team Resilience Assessment

In 1999 Harvard Business School Professor of Leadership and Management Amy Edmondson discovered that Psychological Safety was the most crucial factor for determining team performance.

Edmondson defines Psychological Safety as including the following three traits:

  1. Team members have a shared belief the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking;
  2. Team members have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up; and
  3. It describes a team climate characterised by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.

Gary RyanOther than academic circles, Edmondson’s discovery lay relatively dormant until 2012, when Google’s Julia Rozovsky (a Yale graduate) teamed with members from Carnegie Mellon University to discover the factors that drive team high performance within Google. Simply, Google wanted to know what factors drive the perfect team. The project was called Project Aristotle, and over 100 Google teams participated in the research. Over two years, an enormous amount of data was collected.

The researchers discovered that various factors matter. Dependability (trusting teammates to do their job), structure and clarity (setting clear goals), ensuring the work is meaningful for each team member, and achieving a positive impact on the organisation, are all critical factors for team performance. But none of them is as vital as Psychological Safety!

Edmondson has teamed with WeCare365 in Australia over the early part of 2023 to measure employee Psychological Safety throughout Australia. The result – only 33% of employees report working in psychologically safe teams. This outcome means two-thirds of employees are not performing near their potential, which is a concern for leaders. Action is needed, and Psychological Safety can be improved, but where do you start?

Based on Edmondson’s multiple decades of research, at Organisations That Matter we have designed a simple anonymous survey to quickly assess team and organisational Psychological Safety levels. Another way of describing Psychological Safety is to call it Team Resilience, which is the name for our survey. The survey (SAMPLE MODE) can be completed in less than 10 minutes. You can access all the questions here in our SAMPLE MODE or click on the QR code.

After completing the SAMPLE MODE, please Contact Us if you would like to arrange a tailored survey for your team or organisation, including a report and action plan on your current level of Psychological Safety.

Permission to Reprint
Yes, you may reprint this article in any of your publications – paid or free, electronic or physical, commercial or non-commercial – provided you do not edit it in any way (except for formatting changes to suit your publication style) and include this resource box with the article.
How to get started
To get started contact us, sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on LinkedIn.

Enabling organisations to be worthy of the commitment of employees