Organizational Health

Organizational Health as a Driver of Financial and Operating Performance

After many years of experience in the trenches with organizations, of all sizes, across a wide variety of industries, from start-ups to turn-arounds to mergers and acquisitions, it is our assessment at sr4 Partners that Organizational Health is a hard-edged discipline and a key to competitive advantage. We borrow those words – “hard-edged,” “discipline” and “competitive advantage” from others who have helped develop the field of Organizational Health from their individual perspectives:  

McKinsey, which excels at tracking Organizational Health¹. 

BCG, which has developed a methodology for contextualizing it². 

A leading business author, who writes and speaks about it³.

Here at sr4 Partners, we have embraced Organizational Health as the organizing principle behind our reason for being. The statement of intent is:

sr4 Partners helps you improve 
organization-wide performance 
through more cohesive teams,
healthier leaders,  
a thriving culture, and 
an inclusive approach to change.

The language of our statement of intent was not formulated as a marketing pitch that might be different a year from now; it was distilled, extracted, refined … from hundreds of firsthand experiences … in a year-long process to evaluate what we have learned and where we’re willing to take our stand going forward. sr4 Partners has always been about Organizational Health – we just didn’t always know what to call it. We offer it now as a template for positive organizational performance, in four parts.  

Leaders, Teams, Culture, & Change

We have always experienced an organization not as a collection of individuals, but as an aggregation of teams. Some teams are more cohesive than others, and that reveals itself in their performance, as cohesive teams deliver superior results.  

Within all the teams, there are leaders. And then, upward through the organization, there are additional leaders, at different levels. All leaders produce results. But there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do it. For every result that is achieved by unhealthy methods, there is a price to be paid somewhere in the organization.

So, at the player level of the Healthy Organization Game, the ideal state is to have cohesive teams led by healthy leaders. But these teams and leaders are not operating in a vacuum. In fact, they are operating on a cultural playing field that might have evolved from an earlier time, or been purposefully created by the current or recent leadership. Regardless of origin, the culture should be identifiable (I can tell you what our culture is), relevant (Our culture helps me make the right decisions), accessible (Our culture is always running in the back of my mind), and actionable (Our culture pulls me in the direction of our goals and objectives) In our experience, the best word to meet all those needs is: thriving.

Here’s the game we have so far: Cohesive Teams and Healthy Leaders, as players … on a field of Thriving Culture. But here’s the catch: the rules are always changing. From our many years of working with organizations as they’re being buffeted by change, our big takeaway is this: The best outcomes accrue from an operating principle that is decidedly inclusive – a situation in which change is not something that happens to people, but something they participate in. Based on this experience, we embrace inclusive change as the “rules” component of Organizational Health game.

Working with sr4 Partners

When you think sr4 Partners, think these four domains of Organizational Health: 

Healthy Leaders … getting the best out of themselves and the people they lead.

Cohesive Teams … psychologically safe, generating more innovative ideas, making more informed decisions, performing at higher levels. 

Thriving Culture … enabling improved engagement and organizational performance. 

Inclusive Change … an open approach to disruption that helps everyone embrace something new and different. 

With some clients, we work on all four components with the goal of achieving Organizational Health across the board.

With other clients, we might work on one of the four components that has emerged as a recurring problem. 

With still others, we might be called in to assist with just one particular team that happens to be struggling, or a specific leadership cohort, or a problematic aspect of the culture, or a freestanding change event.

What We Actually DO!

Cohesive Teams

It’s common for organizations to have teams that are held back by lack of trust, unhealthy conflict, underutilized strengths, absence of clarity and competing objectives.

We partner with those teams to identify problem areas and co-create solutions that improve team dynamics for everyone involved. Our offerings include:

• Leadership offsite design and facilitation
• Team meeting design and facilitation
• Conference design and facilitation
• Teambuilding experiences
• Learning design
• Skill-building and training sessions on topics such as: Creative problem-solving and innovation, communication skills, collaboration skills, DiSC, healthy conflict, MBTI, strength profile

Healthy Leaders

Healthy leadership can sometimes get thrown off-track by lack of self-awareness, ineffective communication, infrequent feedback, conflicting priorities or poor delegation.

We partner with leaders to help them hone their strengths, mitigate their weaknesses, develop needed skills and process the challenges they are facing. We offer:

• Coaching
• Leadership 360s
• New Leader Clarity training
• Presentation training

Thriving Culture

This is what we believe about all cultures: They drive business performance. They enable or inhibit strategy. They are everyone’s responsibility. They are measurable. They can change. 

We work with clients who believe that improving their culture can help improve the performance of their business. Our offerings include:

• The Denison Organizational Culture Survey
• Culture Kaizen consultation
• Diversity research and inclusion activities

Inclusive Change

Here’s what we believe about change: It’s not easy, but you can manage it. Before you can have a new beginning, you must have an ending; in between, you must give people time to transition. Change involves humans and humans have emotions – you must plan for emotional reactions. “Context” is the difference between the few people defining the change and the many people who must embrace it. The human brain has evolved to create automatic pathways or habits; it compares things that are new to things that are familiar – and this comparison is why resistance occurs. Taking a multifaceted approach to change is important; each stakeholder group will need different things at different times. People have embraced what’s new and different when they are ready to teach it to others. 

We help teams prepare for changes large and small by offering:

• Change narrative writing and teaching
• Segmented change management planning and execution
• Formation and facilitation of change champions
• Training and learning design
• Meeting design and facilitation. 

Working with you, in these four aspects of Organizational Health, we can help you get better results … with the people you already have … in the jobs they’re already doing … to the benefit of everyone concerned.

¹ McKinsey says “health has a hard edge: indeed, we’ve come to define it as the capacity to deliver – over the long term – superior financial and operating performance.” They cite tracking data indicating that “healthy companies generated total returns to shareholders three times higher than those of unhealthy ones.” 

² In a blog post entitled Why Organizational Health is the Key to Competitive Advantage in Business, a senior partner at BCG wrote that “At Boston Consulting Group, we define an organization’s health by how well it performs along eight context dimensions (leadership, decision making, strategy and transformation agenda, etc.) which can be measured by our complicatedness survey.  

³ The Advantage: Why Organization Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, by Patrick Lencioni, ranked #11 in Amazon’s “Business & Organizational Learning” category. Quote from the inside flap: “Organizational health will one day surpass all other disciplines in business as the greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage. This is the promise of The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni’s bold manifesto about the most unexploited opportunity in modern business.”