By ISPI HR
Years ago, Scott Keller and Colin Price wrote about a famous soft drink company that struggled in the early 2000s. Executives came and went --- failing to revive this soft drink giant during their tenure. Its rival generated increased return percentages. Yet, this struggling conglomerate left employees "weary and cynical", marked by a "talent exodus as leaders in key positions sought to join winning teams elsewhere."
A soft drink bottling company retiree turned investment consultant living in Barbados soon decided to accept the position of chief executive of the struggling, large soft drink company.
CLEARLY SEEING THE ISSUES
The new chief executive knew exactly what needed to be done:
Capture the full capabilities of the software brand
Grow additional brands in the non-carbonated soft drink market
Create wellness programs, and
Create "adjacent businesses"
THE INFLUENCE OF EXPERIENCE
The chief executive's past experience influenced him to believe that performance improvement alone would NOT get the failing conglomerate to optimal levels.
The executive believed that the paradox of achieving performance improvement was not to focus solely on performance.
He believed that the health of the organization must be focused on, too.
The chief executive qualified the health factors of the company as:
Increasing morale
Increasing company capabilities
Restore strained company partnerships with bottlers
Making the company vision clearer, and
Strengthening a weakened performance culture
The company tackled their "health-related" issues by:
Returning to "living their values"
Working better as a global team
Improving planning
Improving metrics
Improving rewards
Developing more people to enable peak performance
QUESTION OF THE DAY TO PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT PROFESSIONALS:
Do you agree with the chief executive that those "health factors and solutions" are not the same as performance improvement factors and solutions?
I don't agree with him! I believe the "health factors and solutions" are performance improvement factors. Gilberts performance factors in his BEM (also in the derived Six Boxes) line up very much with the identified health-related issues. This link/url is to a brief piece on the BEM http://hpt2014.weebly.com/gilberts-bem.html. Curious if anyone sees any of the identified issues that wouldn't be covered in one of the BEM boxes
Having said that, bad organizational strategy can't be overcome by exemplarily performances by a happy work force - you need both pieces.