‘Leaders are not paid to preside over the inevitable… they are paid to make happen what otherwise would not have happened.’
– Sumantra Ghoshal, author of Bias for Action.
Why does one organization or team manage to improve and others not at all? How can you ensure improvement does succeed timely? Our work High Performance Organizations (HPO) taught us the 4 basic conditions for improvement. The more you meet these basic conditions, the greater the chance that you will achieve your solid improvement objectives within a set timetable.
Is to what extent does your team or organization meet these four basic conditions for improvement?
1. Your organization is proven agile and aimed at improvement
The first question you have to answer for yourself: how well has your organization and team managed to adapt to new circumstances quickly, flexibly and resilient in recent years? Did that go smoothly or was there a lot of resistance, ambiguity and delay? Here are a few questions to estimate the agility of your team or organization:
- Can teams easily discuss everything and search together to get a little better every day? Or do we prefer to stick to how we’ve always done it and do much bigger reorganizations of “accumulated misery” need to be done right?
- Are managers and employees willing to change their habits because new circumstances call for new ones? Or are managers and employees keen to keep everything the same?
- Is there great confidence in each other and in teams that they can jointly meet the challenges of the future? Is there enough confidence in teams to believe they can handle tough challenges too? Or are people negative and anxious about the future and their position?Making an improvement plan work requires a “strong” organization: teams that can change and improve together. Weaker or more anxious organizations or teams have more difficulty adjusting the ways they work and change more slowly and shockingly. For them, the journey to improvement in teams is much more difficult, slower and with more ups-and-downs.
2. There are inclusive leaders, willing to learn
The second important question is whether the leaders of the organization fulfill their management and leadership tasks with attention and pleasure. One of the indicators we use for this is to ask what leaders and managers do themselves to learn about and improve the profession as manager and leader. Do they read books about it? Do they go to training courses? Or do they only visit mandatory training organized by the organization? Or is there even resistance to that?
Leaders who are developing themselves have long known that their behavior and habits largely determine the success of a team. There are no very successful teams with bad leaders or very bad teams with good leaders in the long run. The exemplary behavior of the leader largely determines the behavior of employees. Much more than we assumed until now. Our brain is a social brain and focuses very much on functioning in the group. A leader who regularly examines himself and adjusts his or her behavior will see that the adjusted behavior is adopted. The leader’s habits are “contagious.” A leader who adapts his own habits will thus adjust the behavior and culture of a team. Improvement requires attention in teams and the leader. Leaders who take their job seriously will better understand and act on the challenges of improvement.
3. There is a growth mindset
Some people believe that their talents and abilities are fixed qualities. They have a certain amount of it (“a lot of discipline”, “little mathematic insight”) and that’s it. This fixed mindset can limit people in their success. They focus on proving their talents and abilities on the one hand, and hiding shortcomings on the other. They react defensively to mistakes or setbacks, fearing that they would indicate a lack of talent or talent. They are also more likely to miss important career development opportunities. They see them not so much as an opportunity for learning and growth, but as a risk of failure.
In contrast to this, the growth mindset, people believe that they can develop their talents and abilities through commitment, training and perseverance. Their focus is not on appearing smart, or on brushing up their image. They are eager to learn, dare to take advantage of opportunities and learn from the results. They enjoy working with people who challenge them to grow, they dare to look honestly at their shortcomings and they look for ways to improve them.
Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, is the founder of this theory. She states that the way you see your own talents and skills determines to a large extent how these will develop. All this also means that the best strategy is not to simply hire the most skilled people we can find; but above all to look for people who embody not a fixed, but a growth mindset: a love for learning, an openness to feedback (positive feedback, read feedforward) and the ability to face and overcome obstacles.
Improving your team or organization is a bumpy road that requires a growth mindset from the people in the organization. Things will change, things will go wrong, but as long as we learn from it it will make us better.
4. Show courage at the decisive moments
You may still want to improve, but the point is that you really choose it if you can. Do you choose diversity when you put together a new project team? Do you go for growth mindset even when things go wrong? As a leader, will you continue to give confidence even if it is difficult? Do you focus sharply on what we do and don’t do? Do you dare to follow your plan as a leader or is it too exciting when the pressure from outside or the top of the organization becomes high?
What you do as manager and team in these fearful moments as a manager and team, or what you really want to happen, no matter how difficult it sometimes is. In some organizations you sometimes see the lack of courage to really do what you say you believe in. In these organizations, leaders and teams lack many opportunities to improve and will therefore not improve.
Which of the four basic conditions is in good shape in your team? Which one can you work on? Do you meet the four basic conditions for improving your team?
Let us know! We are happy to help you.