Does Your Organization Have a Warning System in Place?
/“Three beeps and you need to stop.”
Over a family dinner recently, my brother-in-law explained that my mother-in-law’s car has some high-tech alerts on it. I asked my mother-in-law if it had a collision avoidance system, and she responded, “All I know is that if I hear three beeps I need to stop so I don’t bang up the car.”
What if we had a similar alert system for leaders of businesses – when something goes wrong, you hear three beeps and you know you need to stop so you don’t damage your business?
Over the past couple of years at Trajectify we’ve seen some damage to businesses that could have been avoided:
An important employee lost when leaders failed to value, communicate and engage them appropriately.
Time and money wasted on bad hires because there were imprecise selection parameters, poorly defined performance requirements, and ineffective onboarding and management.
A culture where employees are expected to live company values while the owner of the company doesn’t realize that they are failing to live them.
Sometimes leaders are fortunate to have an in-house “human sensor” – a trusted manager who is tuned in when it comes to sensing employee morale, management challenges, communication issues and other critical factors. More often than not, leaders do not have such a warning system and there are “flashing lights” and “warning beeps” of which they are not aware. Having unbiased outsiders evaluate the organization with a structured approach can help bring clarity to issues that may be holding the organization back.
At Trajectify, we utilize a systematic approach to organizational assessment:
Meet with Management: We begin by taking a deep dive to help us understand the history, products and services, goals, values, culture, financials, business practices, policies, structure, challenges and needs of the organization.
Review Key Business Documents: At the end of our initial meeting, we request a download of key documents, such as org charts, position descriptions, performance reviews, process maps, key performance indicators, balance sheets, business plans, and anything else that management may wish to share with us.
Complete Objective Assessment: Everyone at the organization completes BestWork DATA, a data-focused instrument that helps define each person’s strengths and development needs. These assessments offer very specific guidance and also help us evaluate collective traits of the team.
Identify Patterns: We meet with leaders to share initial findings and start to identify patterns as well as areas of focus for next steps.
Interview Employees, Management, and Work Teams: We meet with employees and managers to learn more about their work as well as the organization as a whole. By talking with everyone, we are able to gather qualitative data that may be missed or misunderstood with traditional employee surveys.
Develop Findings and Recommendations: With a broad perspective on what is happening inside the organization, we share a report of our findings to company leaders. While they may be familiar with some of what we share, issues are identified and framed in a clear manner that indicates how issues are affecting organizational performance. We also offer recommendations for actions that can be taken to help improve performance.
Meet with Leaders to Develop an Action Plan: Seeing and understanding issues in the organization is just the first part of the process. Taking action to make improvements is essential. We meet with leaders to help facilitate their game plan going forward, with an emphasis on doing the highest impact / easiest to achieve items first.
People are complicated – and bringing a group of people together to achieve your organizational goals can create a whole series of complex challenges. If you would benefit from an outside-in view of your organization, let’s talk.
Chuck Hall holds a Master of Science in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under leading interdisciplinary experts. Combined with more than 30 years of management and leadership experience, Chuck offers clients insights based on applied knowledge.
