Organizational Development: Examining Business Wellness Ahead of Problems Occurring

Businesses, like other living organisms, can get sick. The afflictions come in a variety of forms, affecting culture, core values, productivity, profitability and sometimes business viability. Sometimes the ailment is more or less the equivalent of having a cold, and sometimes it is much more dangerous and threatening. The symptoms that you notice may not get you too worried, but those you are not aware of should.

Businesses naturally evolve and change. While that is occurring, executives come and go, key customers rise and fall in prominence to our overall business model and financial turmoil in our economy forces detours in our plans that we did not see coming. Change and evolution are good and to be expected, but over time, businesses can also experience “mission drift”. Let’s define that term for our purposes. In young businesses, the early years are spent on highly-focused activity, normally limited to the organization’s core competencies and intended purpose. As the business experiences prosperous years of growth, the organization’s workforce expands to keep up. Roles change as key resources stretch to take on new responsibilities and try to transition some of their knowledge about their old role to someone else. Interpretation creeps in. So does improvisation.

It is at this point that the original organizational culture and passion the business has grown up with gets a test, as damaging dilution of those attributes begins to occur as fresh blood being pumped into the environment. It is also at this inflection point that things can begin to slip. Sometimes the change is positive. New ideas are added to the mix and innovation is revitalized. The key is to take measures to preserve the core essence of goodness that allowed the growth to transpire in the first place.

Determining Factors

We have probably all heard the saying, “stand for something or fall for anything”. That sage wisdom applies in business as well. The mission, core values and organizational tenants of the business should have been memorialized early on in the business plan and subsequent strategic plans produced by management.  Those artifacts serve as the baseline to ground the business as evolutionary development occurs. Without a foundational grounding, the mission drift spoken about earlier can accelerate and cause more significant issues in the business.

Complacency

Strong leadership during growth periods is essential to curtail strategic dilution and avoid organizational complacency (one of the negative outcomes of uncontrolled growth). To understand why, let us examine the potential impact of poor leadership.

Poor leadership during such a period erodes confidence and creates complacency and disconnectedness. Why? These outcomes  show themselves when people begin focusing on the wrong things as a result of the business-essential tacit knowledge held by the original core team (the same team that had helped keep the ship on course early on) being stretched and worn thin. Some workers begin to feel overworked, while others may feel vastly underutilized. Systems for communication and measurement must be re-adjusted. Likewise, organizational goals must be re-stated and re-enforced through updated strategic and operational planning.

Preventative Maintenance

Change occurs slowly in a day-by-day fashion that is hard to observe and take notice of as it happens.  We also do not suddenly look at our business one day and say, “hey, we changed yesterday and now things feel out of sync”. As such, management can save everyone headaches by proactively doing “wellness checks” on the business periodically.

Areas to address during a business wellness check include checking for the following:

–  Strategy Alignment to Vision

–  Strategy Alignment to Mission Statement

–  Strategy Alignment to Core Values

–  Strategy Alignment to Culture

–  Strategy Alignment to Core Competencies

–  Strategy Alignment to Value Proposition

–  Strategy Alignment to Operations

The ultimate component of the wellness check, obviously, is analyzing the fiscal well-being of the business. If all of the above are kept up to date, the fiscal well-being of the business might just take care of itself.

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