Improve Your Organization's Performance Right Now!

by Patrick Ibarra

The results your organization is currently realizing are not achieved by chance. And, although they are partly influenced by factors outside your control, not the least of which is the current economic crisis, your organization’s results also have a great deal to do with factors within your control—most notably your business strategy and how you have designed your organization. Organizations looking to emerge from the current economic crisis stronger and better positioned for success will be forced to embrace new ways of thinking. They need to reinvent themselves by deconstructing ineffective organizational structures, redefining leadership and performance, and revitalizing business practices around management hierarchy. Contrary to popular mythology, the thing that most impedes innovation in organizations is not a lack of risk taking. The real brake on innovation is the drag of old mental models.

A number of government organizations have had to make drastic budget cuts. Budget cuts can be like dieting: one may lose weight but you don’t necessarily become healthier because of it. Therefore, while cuts have been made, the organization’s ability to execute its mission may be negatively impacted. Many leaders are playing an excruciating waiting game: if we can just hold on, one of these days things will finally get back to normal.

It’s time for these leaders to arrive at a radically different conclusion: forget about waiting for normal to return because this is the new normal. Consequently, leaders have the opportunity to hit the organization’s reset button. They can use the instability of the present to build on and create organizations that are capable of continuous self-renewal in the absence of a crisis. In the process, they can change key rules of the game, reshape parts of the organization, and redefine the work people do. Managers are often captives of a paradigm that places the pursuit of efficiency ahead of every other goal. The goal should be to improve your ability to manage a perplexing paradox—how to stay focused on today’s business while building tomorrow’s.

Leaner organizations now accompany smaller budgets, and organizational leaders are seeking answers to how to maintain citizen satisfaction with their government given these unprecedented challenges. Here’s one guarantee: citizens won’t lessen their expectations simply because fewer resources exist. So, what are you going to do? Increasingly, leaders are implementing reorganizations to departments and, in some cases, to the entire organization. It seems the trauma of this recession has made it far easier to make dramatic changes that otherwise would be off-limits.

Evaluate Links between Structure and Performance

The success of an alternative organizational structure requires much more than simply moving rectangles around an organization chart. It requires a healthy balance between creativity and discipline. Designing a reorganization without applying sufficient attention to identify what else needs to happen beyond the reorganization will produce practically no positive results and may unexpectedly exacerbate other pressing issues. For a reorganization to translate into substantive differences in how work is executed, an evaluation of the linkage, or nexus, between organizational structure and organizational performance must be properly conducted. A well-designed organization ensures that the form or infrastructure of the organization matches its purpose and strategy, meets the challenges posed by business realities, and significantly increases the likelihood that the collective efforts of people will be successful.

One way to view the linkage between organizational structure and organizational performance is by viewing it through a systemic lens. That is to say, performance is a function of a system and not any one specific element. For employees and organizations to achieve optimal performance, the individual employee, work processes, and organizational conditions must be in alignment. A breakdown at any one of the levels will prevent optimal performance.

The organization lays the foundation for a high-performance work system as it creates a purpose and focus for the organization and its members by adopting and, more important, translating a mission, a vision, a set of core values, and operating strategies into the employee’s role in making these happen. The line of sight must be clear between what employees work on every day and how their work contributes to the organization’s purpose. Remember, no positive association exists between employees completing more tasks and a successful organization. What employees work on is significantly more important than how much work each completes.

Process essentially describes how work gets done. It is focused on improving the business and work processes used in the delivery of services by determining whether such areas as workflow, use of technology, and performance management procedures support the focus of the organization. Necessary for ensuring processes are in alignment is the creation and implementation of performance measures to use as a “dashboard.” Results-based performance measures should link to strategic objectives; provide accurate, understandable, and timely information; be accepted as legitimate by organizational members; and produce benefits in excess of their cost.

Cities and counties are seeking to have work processes evaluated to determine where the non-valued-added work is and remove it. Their goal is to expedite service delivery and enhance effectiveness.

Individual performers within the organization affect the processes. The relationship must be aligned among individual performance goals, knowledge, skills, and coaching and feedback received. A disturbing trend shows organizations discarding existing performance appraisal processes. Although the performance appraisal process is in need of improvement almost everywhere, summarily dismissing it does not bode well for those leaders who truly want to calibrate performance and understand better what their top performers do.

Although your agency may have a hiring freeze in place right now, this is the perfect time to reevaluate the traditional human resources functions of recruiting, retaining, and developing your organization’s talent. Establishing a unified talent development strategy is no longer a luxury, but is the standard for those who seek to not simply exist, but flourish. This economy will turn around, and when it does, what type of employees will stay with your agency and which ones will depart? Determining which employees you want to retain and working arduously to ensure that happens is crucial to continued success for your organization. As workforce demographics evolve and economic constraints prohibit increases in head count, failure to develop employees in a focused and predictive way not only directly impacts your agency’s performance but also hinders its ability to be responsive and sustainable.

Three Factors Are Prominent

In summary, it is vital that leaders synchronize these three factors—organization, process, and individuals—in order to achieve better results and improve organizational performance. With limited resources being available for the foreseeable future, sustaining quality government means everyone in your organization needs to know what is expected of them. What is important is absolute clarity on strategy and improving operational performance and realizing the key to success is having a culture with the discipline to accept change.

Patrick Ibarra (patrick@gettingbetterallthetime.com) is cofounder and partner, The Mejorando Group (www.gettingbetterallthetime.com), Glendale, Arizona. He is a former city manager and human resources director.

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