Emulating the best of the best lends itself to success. But it’s not always easy to figure out what they’re doing so well that makes them the best. As a coach, trainer, or business leader, it’s your job to dig up or uncover those gold nuggets and then figure out how to get your team or your company to do those same things.

If you want to have a high-performing organization, the good news is that you don’t have to work very hard to identify those things that really yield high performance – regardless of role, level, or function. It’s already been done for you. A group at Root recently completed an analysis of proven approaches that lead to high-performing individuals and, ultimately, a high-performing organization. Among the gems they’ve uncovered:

  1. Nurture a Strategy; Don’t Launch ItA PowerPoint presentation from the CEO at a town hall meeting probably isn’t going to get it done. Achieving strategic objectives requires ongoing conversations, curiosity, and applying learnings to refine the strategy.
  2. Hardwiring the Last 100 Yards – Organizations need to ensure that every level of the business, from leaders, to managers, to individual contributors, can directly connect their roles to delivering the strategy.
  3. The Great Paradox of Accountability – Successful companies encourage cross-functional collaboration, using commonly defined metrics to track performance, and peer-to-peer accountability to create results.
  4. Return Receipt Required – Strategies are most successful when they are passed to people with a built-in feedback loop that provides for a constant “return-receipt process” that allows for ongoing strategy refinement and communication.
  5. Not Lost in Translation – Great strategists take the time to translate the strategy from the language of the expert (shoptalk) to the language of the user (street talk) and not view it as a “one-and-done” approach.
  6. “Why” Matters More Than You Think – When people understand the “whys,” “whats,” and “hows” of a strategy, it instantly makes a lot more sense. In successful companies, employees at all levels are able to articulate where their company ranks in the industry and what makes them unique among their competitors.
December 4, 2012

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