Most organisations today are investing in initiatives to improve their performance including the likes of strategic planning exercises, leadership programmes, culture initiatives, and performance management systems.
Yet, despite these efforts, they tend to have very little impact on an organisation’s results because they are applied as standalone practices rather than the component parts of a performance system.
The issue is not due to a lack of effort. It’s architecture. As a result:
- Strategy is set, but not operationalised
- Culture is defined, but not enacted
- Leadership is developed, but not leveraged
- Capability is built, but not aligned to strategic outcomes
- Performance is managed, but not structurally improved
In other words, things are happening but as they are separate disciplines, they have almost no effect on an organisation’s productivity or performance.
What this means commercially
When the drivers of performance are approached separately:
- Impact varies across functions
- Initiatives compete for attention rather than reinforce one another
- Leadership effectiveness differs between levels
- Strategic execution remains difficult to manage
- Returns on investment remain hard to justify
Effort is being made but it doesn’t translate to improvements in organisational outcomes.
The structural constraint
Decades of research on human and organisational performance revealed to us five disciplines that govern organisational success and we have developed the Vantaset 5 Drivers of Workplace Performance™ - Strategy, Culture, Leadership, Capability, and Performance Management.
While every organisation understands the importance of these disciplines, how they are applied determines the value they add. Without an operating system to integrate them, they tend to sit outside people’s jobs rather than acting as infrastructure to help them excel in their jobs.
When this occurs, organisations become reliant on individual leaders bringing them to life all the while trying to manage their personal workloads.
As a result, the difference they make to an organisation’s performance is almost negligible even though the disciplines themselves are critical.
Read The Performance Execution Gap - an Executive Brief
The future of organisational performance
Performance-OS™ changes this by turning the Vantaset 5 Drivers™ into a coherent High-Performance Operating System that supports the entire business meaning:
- Success becomes clear to everyone across every level of the business
- Performance becomes scalable and repeatable
- Capability and culture become aligned with the organisation’s strategy
- Performance management becomes a mechanism for continuous improvement
Instead of individual programmes running alongside people’s roles, Performance-OS™ gives you the system or infrastructure to help people excel in their roles.
A practical next step
The question for executives is not whether these drivers are relevant, it is “What is the price they’re paying for their lack of integration and coherence?”
To help you answer this question, we offer a free, online performance diagnostic to help you:
- Identify where your current approach is working and where it’s not
- Highlight where misalignment is occurring and why
- Clarify what you would need to change to transform your organisation’s effectiveness
Try our PERFORMANCE-OS™ Performance Diagnostic to find out how ready your organisation is to transform
In summary
While organisations are investing in the right things to improve their performance, the fact the vast majority are using standalone tools - rather than integrated systems - means the value they're getting from their investment is limited.
This is where the difference between success and failure lies, i.e. it’s not the ‘things’ organisations are focusing on that's the problem, it’s how they are approaching them.
If you would like to discuss the results of your diagnostic and/or how to address any gaps, please contact us.