Teaming Up: Moving From Siloed to a Network of Teams
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
The age of the hierarchical organization is quickly coming to an end. Businesses are reinventing themselves to compete in this complex and unpredictable world of change and opportunity, and this change applies to any and all industries, both small and large organizations. Organizations are decentralizing decision making, moving toward product and customer-centric performance models, and forming an agile network of highly engaged teams that communicate and deliver results in powerful ways.
This “network of teams” performance model which promotes high employee engagement, strong, real-time communication, and rapid information flow is transforming organizations and providing for a very powerful organizational competitive advantage. These teams are purpose-focused, consistently exhibit the right team behaviors, are committed and supported at the very highest level of the organization.
But, as easy and enticing as it sounds to move to this team model the initial transition and the ability to actually enable and sustain long term success is difficult. Breaking down entrenched silos, cultivating true “shared responsibility”, ensuring transparency, and mastering the art of agile collaboration can become frustrating and very easy to abandon at the first sign of resistance. We know because we assist organizations in enabling this highly effective engagement team performance model on a day to day basis.
Over the next several weeks, we will share with you the struggles and the successes many organizations encounter in this transition and provide an effective path forward for your organization.
So why now? According to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trend study, 92 percent of companies believe that redesigning the organization is imperative, making it No. 1 in ranked importance among their respondents.
So the question becomes: Is your organization moving to become more fluid and agile through greater employee and team engagement? If not, you are about to be competing against those that are.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Does Your Organization CARE to Engage Your Employees?
If you want better employee engagement, it can’t just be delegated to managers or HR. Our clients with 90+% employee engagement scores enable that success using a simple C.A.R.E engagement model.
Clarity
Creating and maintaining clarity throughout any organization is crucial to achieving and sustaining measurable top-tier performance and engagement. Clarity in two ways; developing, cultivating and leveraging the organization’s “people” advantage and then maintaining a finger on the pulse of people’s engagement is critical.
People want a “reason to believe” in the organization they work for and they want to know that what they do matters and that their contributions are valued. This is the organization providing clarity so people, no matter where they are in the organization, feel connected and valued. What is your organizations “reason to believe”?
Alignment
Aligning performance environment, culture, people, process and behaviors with purpose, vision, mission and values is a critical key to achieving sustained performance and employee engagement.
Resources
To continually cultivate and enable an organization where everyone is leading where they are and where leaders are supporting the growth and development of their people (and in turn driving results and engagement) requires the organization to invest in resources that both support and advance those efforts.
Enable
It’s time to enable!
Create and cultivate a culture and organizational performance environment that enables and accelerates success, not impedes or becomes a barrier to success. Form engagement teams, provide all employee engagement training and cultivate an organization that is employee engaged, leader supported, and organizational enabled.
Start by:
Ensuring that executive and senior leaders are aligned on purpose, vision, mission and values and are providing clarity and continually reinforcing the reason to believe for every employee.
Developing an effective onboarding process that provides leadership training and support for all new hires.
Providing coaching and mentoring to formal leaders so they in turn can more effectively coach and mentor their people.
Establishing a process that continually assesses organizational effectiveness and employee engagement and turns that feedback into rapid change.
Provide ongoing training and support that develops the leader in everyone.
So how much does your organization truly CARE about your employee’s engagement?
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Want Better Employee Engagement? Become a CEO (Chief Engagement Officer) for Your People.
If you want better employee engagement, leaders need to cultivate and support an environment of engagement, not compliance. If you are a formal leader of people, add the duties of the CEO (Chief Engagement Officer) to your role.
Our clients that have seen double digit improvement in overall employee engagement have leaders that cultivate employee-led engagement. They stop managing their people and begin developing environments of personal performance, accountability, change, and connecting people to a purpose, not a task. They enable so many more decisions then they could ever personally make in the past. Now that is true empowerment!
Engaged leaders look beyond titles, roles, and position descriptions of their people. They match talent to opportunity. We had one of our clients take a product manager, tap them on the shoulder to lead the effort to build a brand-new multimillion-dollar headquarters location. That building came four weeks ahead of schedule and right on budget…..they matched talent to opportunity and success happened.
As a leader, are you:
Now is the time to make the leadershift and take on the role of CEO (Chief Engagement Officer). You and your organization will be glad you did.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Creating an Engaged Environment
If you want better employee engagement, you better engage your employees.
Talking about engaging employees is easy, actually creating a truly engaged employee environment that moves beyond just surveying employees annually, now that is difficult.
In fact, according to the Gallup organization, the percentage of engaged employees has not moved 2-3 percentage points in over 18 years. But our work with clients has shown that, in fact, you can positively impact employee engagement by enabling and supporting a performance environment that actively engages employees in 5 key engagement areas.
Change – Cultivate an environment that leads change and sees possibilities in everything, not that tries to manage change and allows the status quo to dominate the culture.
Performance Management – Flip the model from managers reviewing performance to leaders that pursue performance and that coach to expectations which are set and owned by their employees.
Accountability – Develop an organization where managers aren’t responsible for holding employees more accountable but create the environment where everyone holds themselves more accountable and where negative people don’t make the workplace caustic, but the workplace is caustic to negative people.
Relationships – Engagement is all about establishing relationships.
Break down silos by creating cross functional engagement teams that leverages unique talents, not position titles, to deliver top-tier results.
Move from transactional relationships to creating more authentic relationships.
Purpose – Is everyone in the organization connected to a purpose greater than their daily work tasks? Do they know how, where, and why they are making a significant difference in the work they do?
We have seen organizations move the employee engagement needle 20-30 percentage points, not just 2-3, by truly engaging employees. If you want more information on exponentially enhancing employee engagement, then engage in a conversation with us, and even with our clients, where we partner with them to be that much needed catalyst for employee engagement success, not employee survey apathy.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Moving Performance From Compliance to Engagement
A top-down, command and control performance environment can get things done and generate success. But it often cultivates a culture of employee compliance and negatively impacts overall employee engagement. Let's take a look at the difference between a compliance-driven organization versus a purpose-driven, employee engaged performance environment and ways we can make a personal shift to greater individual and team engagement.
Compliant Behaviors
Performance is managed
Blame and justification
Task-focused
See obstacles
Waits for things to happen
Engaged Behaviors
Lead your personal performance
Seek understanding
Purpose-driven
Seek possibilities
Make things happen
Consider yourself fortunate if your organization is creating and cultivating top-tier performance through a sustained, employee engaged performance model. For those of us not so fortunate, how do we step up, lead where we are, and begin the shift from performance compliance to active engagement?
Personal Shift One - Begin by taking control of your performance and leading it by proactively setting expectations with your manager aligned to organizational purpose and vision. Once you set expectations, conduct monthly performance feedback sessions with your leader. If you don’t want your performance managed semiannually and/or annually, then engage by actively managing your personal performance and begin to reimagine performance management as performance development.
Personal Shift Two - If you see and hear blaming and justification then stop and seek understanding first, get clear and get aligned.
Personal Shift Three – Transform from task-focused delivery to purpose-driven engagement.
Personal Shift Four – Where you see obstacles and potential failure, turn it around, seek possibilities in everything, and create options and recommendations.
Personal Shift Five – Stop waiting for things to happen to you, go out and make things happen, stop playing the waiting game.
Break free of a compliant performance environment by actively engaging, leading and cultivating your own personal performance, change, relationships, and accountability. If you want better employee engagement, you better engage in your own personal performance.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
PART II: One Organization and Their Journey to Enhanced Employee Engagement
Last week we introduced a client case study of a 130-year-old oil and gas organization and their journey to enhancing employee engagement throughout the Finance and Accounting (F&A) organization. In the introductory blog we highlighted one key to more effective employee engagement was to CARE more! Clarity, Alignment, Resources and Enable. To change the current performance environment to better reflect the aspirational culture statements found displayed throughout the organization we had to establish greater clarity to an organizational purpose and align the entire F&A organization to that greater purpose.
This purpose allows people to move past “task-focused” activities to “purpose-driven” action and performance. It encourages everyone to no longer accept the status quo and to boldly challenge the future and transition from silo-ed functional teams to collaborative, connected, and highly engaged teams and individuals contributing to a common greater purpose. We have gained that clarity and alignment by creating employee-led engagement teams chartered to redefine the F&A performance environment and establishing ongoing clarity and alignment through education, connection, and relationship.
Greater employee engagement is already happening with these efforts, but this is only the foundation, the very first step. The key is sustaining and even enhancing this engagement long term. We now move to leverage the 'R' and the 'E' of CARE: Resources and Enablement. The organization is applying resources that develops every F&A leader and employee to “lead where they are”, to enable greater personal and team accountability, to lead change, not manage it, and, to empower personal and team performance. They are turning outdated performance management into the future of performance development. They do this with innovative training, coaching, reward and recognition, and engagement teams that create ongoing reinforcement activities introduced every month that ensure sustained engagement at every level. And they are rapidly moving from the task of compiling spreadsheets and the reporting of numbers to providing compelling insights from those numbers that make a positive and dynamic impact.
The organization is quickly becoming a model for gaining and sustaining employee engagement. You want better employee engagement? You better engage the employees and CARE more!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.