Last week I had the pleasure to spend some time with an extremely successful investment banker from one of the most prestigious firms in the country. He asked me about what I was doing now and told him a little about my work in helping organizations become more healthy.
His reaction took me by surprise: “So you basically help people enjoy their work more? That’s really noble for sure but I’m really not sure that’s the point of business.”
He’s right to conclude that one benefit of a healthy organization is that people who work there enjoy their work more.
Others report better relationships with their colleagues. People in healthy organizations seldom have to deal with gossip, backbiting and rumors. There are no politics to cope with.
People work freely across departments without the red tape and bureaucracy that silos often create. There are no pitched battles between the ops and sales departments that are bloody and unwinnable for both.
People in healthy organizations can be creative and take risks without worrying about covering their rear ends, secure in the knowledge that their fellow coworkers are not waiting for them to make a mistake so they can throw them under the bus and steal their next promotion. Conflict is settled quickly and definitively because everyone trusts each other to speak their minds openly and get decisions resolved once and for all.
There is little or no confusion in healthy organizations. There is absolutely no daylight between the leaders of the company; they all communicate the same messages consistently and across the organization so everyone hears the same thing at the same time.
The human structures are as consistent as they are simple; and they serve to reinforce culture without promoting bureaucracy. The benefits of healthy organizations are many.
But none of these benefits constituted the only reason leaders should put in the time and effort to build a healthy team. My colleague was correct that none of these are good enough reasons to go to the trouble of building a healthy organization.
A company is not called “healthy” just because its employees enjoy working together. An organization is not “healthy” just because it is aligned around a single priority and everyone is on the same page. A team is not “healthy” just because teammates hold each other accountable and passionately debate ideological differences of opinion until the leader breaks the tie.
There is only one thing that identifies an organization as healthy: results over time.
The one reason — the only reason — to build a healthy organization is for the sake of its results.
The only way to measure the health of an organization is its results over time. A healthy organization achieves mind-blowing results consistently year after year and decade after decade.
If you’re not happy with your team’s results, chances are you need to become more healthy. If you’re crushing it and have been for years, chances are you already are healthy even if you don’t know what that means.
How healthy are your results?
