Some organizations never reach their potential. Often they lack clarity and leadership commitment on one or more critical levels of organizational functioning. This can be solved with alignment around a “profile” of high performance at each of four key levels.
High Perfomance Profiles: Services and Approach
Organizations often under-perform because they lack clarity and alignment at one or more levels: strategy, operating model, culture, and job performance. At High Performance Profiles we create clear, customized statements of intent at these four levels of organizational function. We call these statements “profiles” and they contain the information an organization needs to have clear direction. Getting clarity and alignment among leaders, and the whole organization, on these four levels can get everyone “rowing together” and can propel an organization towards much stronger results.
Please note, all our work at HPP uses proven, and in some cases proprietary, diagnosis and analysis techniques that create profiles that are totally customized for each client’s need, situation, history, desired future, industry, and capability to execute. If you are looking for something off the shelf, or recycled from another organization, read no further. If you believe that your situation, issues, and abilities are unique, then we might be the firm to help you reach a higher level of performance.
How We Begin
Some organizations know exactly where they need more clarity and alignment. Others are less clear on what level would have the most impact. In those cases we can perform a short diagnostic study to determine where the biggest gaps are and what clarity and alignment efforts would have the most impact. We do not seek to mechanically march down all four levels of profiles if it is not needed. In fact, the best situation is where gaining alignment at one level gets everything working better.
Strategy
Does your organization have a clear set of choices about how it will differentiate and succeed in its chosen markets?
Strategy is the set of choices an organization makes about what it will do and pursue over the next few years, and what it won’t. This can include products and products and services, geographies, industries, service levels, and value-added differentiators. Sometimes there is no strategy and leaders are each pursuing their own differing agendas. An organization cannot operate well without making strategic decisions. One barrier to strategy is that the environment is constantly changing presenting problems and new opportunities. We do not advocate a static unchanging strategy but rather a dynamic strategy that is a frequent topic of discussion and decision-making by leaders. We will assist the organization in identifying its most important strategic decisions and to make choices based on the anticipated future that can then be used to align every aspect of the organization to achieve the organizations objectives.
Operating Model
Is the way your organization operates designed on purpose to be effective, or is it a collection of historical practices?
An operating model is the set of systems, meetings, information, work processes, and assumptions about how things get decided and done. An ineffective operating model is often the greatest source of frustration among leaders. Developing a High Performance Profile for the Operating Model can be a major source of renewed energy and moving in a common direction, without the usual reorganization that still does not resolve the operating model. The Operating Model Profile will clarify how the organization will operate and serve as an audit tool to improve organizational effectiveness going forward.
Culture
Does the underlying culture that governs how people behave help or hurt your organizations success?
Many leaders express frustration with the current culture of their organization. Cultures develop early in an organizations life then evolve as new people bring in assumptions from other organizations. And the culture controls many of the ways things get done and the behavior of members. These “accidental cultures” can be changed, and it starts with a profile of the desired culture. HPP helps organizations clarify their desired culture by developing a profile that describes the desired state on multiple dimensions. Such a profile can be used to move towards the desired state with communication, debriefing meetings and other events, and measuring the gap between desired and actual culture with surveys. Knowing the gap between the desired and actual culture can help you create pin-point changes that will make a more consistent and effective organizational culture.
Job Performance
Does your organization know how high performance happens in critical jobs, or is individual high performance just something you hope for?
Most organizations don’t really know the factors that differentiate high performance from average performance for people in the most critical jobs. If they adopt a set of competencies, it usually describes average performance across a wide set of differing jobs. Without knowing the real factors that differentiate performance in your environment you can’t reliably hire, coach, motivate and reward high performers and keep them performing at their best in critical jobs. We work with organizations to develop highly customized, fact-based, performance profiles for key jobs through a proprietary approach of studying the highest performers in your environment. We identify and describe those factors in ways that can be used to hire, develop, and promote much more accurately.
How We Work
We work with our clients to identify their desired scope of consulting support. For each desired profile we work against a project plan that usually has 2-4 milestone meetings to clarify all elements of the profile over a period of 2-3 months. In between the milestone meetings we are gathering data, opinions, success examples and vision for the future. We combine this internally gained information and insights with our prior experience about high performance organizations. Then, most importantly, we begin to build leadership alignment around a direction for the profile. We reveal the level of alignment and misalignment and work with leadership to close any gaps and solidify on a direction that leaders can actively support.
The principles that guide our process were developed over several decades and hundreds of organizational changes to create powerful profiles that drive high performance.
