What’s Holding You Back?

You already know what’s holding you back. What’s blocking sustainable organizational change, efficiency and effectiveness. You see the causes every day.

So let’s make no bones about it. You’re falling short of high performance because most – if not all – of the following are true:

• Nothing changes fast enough. There’s a lack of urgency, and enterprise and customer focus.
• Too many people fall back on the “this is how we do it” excuse.
• Senior leaders are perceived as unaligned and sending an inconsistent message to the organization.
• People publicly agree with decisions, but privately sabotage them.
• Execution consistently falls short. Clear objectives and goals are derailed during implementation, and there are always excuses and reasons.
• People build ‘silos’ and ‘bunkers’ and work toward their own goals, rather than the goals of the organization. You end up refereeing conflicts between people and groups who should be partnering together.
• Employee engagement is not where it should be. People are afraid to speak up and contribute; employee surveys reflect a lack of trust and safety.
• The rumor mill or grapevine is a stronger form of communication than messages from leaders.
• Attempts to raise the level of performance have produced only incremental change. They simply become the ‘program-of-the-month’.

Why have you been unable to resolve these problems?

Surprisingly, the answer is quite simple: you’ve been focusing on organizational change, when you should have been focusing on behavioral change. Or you’ve attempted behavioral change only to be disappointed with small improvements that fall far short of what you need.

The reality is that competent individuals don’t spontaneously come together as a high performance team just because you’ve restructured your organization. Leaders don’t align just because the organization has an aggressive strategy, clear vision and strong values. You can’t change how people behave with mandates, slogans or programs-of-the-month. No amount of cajoling, persuading or threatening will alter what people do.

In fact, exactly the opposite is true. If you don’t address behavior directly, unproductive behaviors will always persist. People will continue to react instinctively to protect their interests, leading to a victim and entitlement mindset, unhealthy competition, defense of the status quo, and divisiveness. They’ll continue to work in silos and fight for resources. They’ll continue to comply with directives, but will withhold their discretionary effort and enthusiasm. In other words, they’ll go on behaving exactly as they always have; they’ll just take it underground where you can’t see it.

Nothing works when people are not working together. You need new rules of engagement to transform core values into an enduring behavioral framework that gets people to align, collaborate, and work together across organizational boundaries to deliver exceptional results.

You need to transform leadership behavior, then roll that transformation out across the entire business unit or organization.

Find out how...