Say Goodbye to Mediocre: How To Improve Organizational Performance

Organizational performance is critical to every organization as it contributes to the make or break of the company's success. Shareholders, investors, and leadership teams fear their organization will lose its competitive edge and become a mediocre player in their market. This article will review the cause and how we can improve it to improve organizational performance.?

Cause of Mediocrity

There are several factors that cause an organization to have poor performance, from technology and processes to people. I'd like to focus on the people element as it later contributes to the dysfunction in the process and technology.?

1. Competing Priorities

Organizations set their goals and cascade them down to division and department levels. Most of the time, the head of each department will develop their own goals and objectives accordingly to measure their and their team's performance. The mediocrity starts when each functional head focuses on its goals, creates its directions and objectives, and performs in a silo environment.?

When a department can complete its tasks in its silo, things wouldn't be a problem. But when they need to work across functions and ask other departments to support their work and competing priorities, most organizations and teams get stuck.?

Competing priorities create stress, unnecessary conflicts, and workload that cause an organization to be mediocre.?

To avoid challenges from competing priorities, teams must work together to understand their organizational priorities and work together to create alignments for short, mid, and long-term goals.?

They should also review their goals regularly to remain relevant and aligned with the company's objectives.

2. Poor Understanding of Team Dynamics

Most leaders underestimate the power of poor team dynamics because they think they know their team well.?

The fact is that when strategies, goals, and objectives change, team dynamics also change. You can expect some changes in performance. If leaders are not aware of the team dynamics and have plans to handle the situations, organizational performance will suffer.?

Here are some examples of poor team dynamics

Example 1.? A Sales Organization During the Pandemic. There's a change in the way of work and processes.

Top sales performers declined in performance and productivity because they didn't enjoy working from home. They enjoyed meeting and gaining energy from in-person meetings. Some other sales employees increased their performance because they were introverted, and they gained more energy working at their own pace at home.?

Example 2. An aftermarket industrial parts company loses its sales revenue because of the changes in its customer service strategy.?

General Manager wanted to increase sales and thought their customer service could add more value by proactively reaching out to the existing customers who have ordered their products and recommending additional products. The customer service reps will change their way of working, from taking orders and following up on their logistics to learning more about products and parts, proactively contacting their customers, and asking for additional orders.

The customer service reps are not trained for an outreach role. Most of the customer service team members are introverted and have low confidence in approaching people, let alone asking for orders. They feel that they must push their products to the customers and start hating their jobs. As a result, not only the sales decrease but also the customer satisfaction in service delivery as well.?

Having a new strategy is great, but having an understanding of the talent strengths and dynamics of the team and employees will help an organization better plan for its strategy, change management, conflicts, and breakdowns.?

3. Hustling long hours of work

Long working hours ? High Productivity?

Organizations are asking employees to work hard. Many employees took on added responsibilities working 2-3 jobs with or without a new paycheck. In the short term, everything seemed fine, so the assumptions were that the employee was ok with the work.

The short-term gain will affect the organization’s health when employees feel burnout and lose productivity. Everything is so urgent and important that they must sacrifice their personal lives to complete the tasks.

Many employees already experience burnout. A good indicator or a sign that could lead to burning out, later on is the ability to disconnect from work.

Employees feel they are pressured to work extra hours because it's a norm. The leaders lead by example by working long hours, sending emails late at night, and not taking a proper vacation.

Supporting leaders to learn how to help their team prioritize and create a culture that it’s a MUST that employees have a break to take care of themselves will help the organizations in the longer term.??

Steps to Improve Organizational Performance

Here are 3 suggestions to get started in improving organizational performance.

• Foster Open Communication?

Open communication is not about having tools like Slack or Chat but more about aligning your organization and team communication. Open communication between teams and departments will help break down the silos and foster better collaboration, leading to better decision-making, increased innovation, and better business outcomes.

• Develop and Train Effective Leaders

When leaders are effective, everyone gains benefits. Effective Leaders create ripple effects not only within their own teams but also across different teams as well. Skills that leaders can embrace are emotional intelligence, communication up and across, how to inspire their team to perform, time management, and delegation.?

• Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement culture helps build high-performing organizations. When employees embrace a culture of constant improvement, they are always looking for ways to improve their performance, processes, products, and services.?

Having a stellar performance organization is critical. Whether or not an organization can get there depends on how the leadership team prioritizes its organizational strategy.

To say goodbye to mediocrity is Intentional. It's impactful. It's not easy, but doable.??

Wishing Leaders All The Best!?

Nannapat Sage