What’s your cholesterol level?  Are you at the optimum weight for your height?  Is your level of general fitness adequate for the demands your life makes on your body?

These might be questions you have been considering, as I have, over the past few weeks, as you assess the toll the end of year celebrations have taken on your body!  Indeed you may have made a few resolutions and made a few changes as a result.

But when did you as a business leader last systematically assess the current state of health of your organisation?  I don’t mean its financial state – I bet you check on that all the time.  Nor do I mean the structures, systems, policies, legal compliance and other concrete issues, that I am confident you, as do most of our clients, keep a more or less close eye on all the time.  I mean the body of the organisation – its heart, lungs and circulation! 

In my book that means knowing at any given moment whether the strategy and direction of the organisation is in good shape right the way through to the most junior member of staff and the farthest outpost.  It means measuring, with as much rigour as you measure your financial state, that the culture of the organisation is healthy, and up to the demands you make on it.  And it means knowing that every area of the organisation is delivering optimum performance and results, and doing so in a way that doesn’t demand that ‘all-hands-to-the-pump’ desperate dash at the end of each quarter or the end of the year.

What is ‘Organisation Health’?

Basically I mean the degree to which the unique characteristics of your organisation support or hinder what it exists for.  If you are training to be an Olympic long distance runner the requirements of your bodily health will be different from what sustains your body as someone who takes little or no exercise!  You need different priority areas, amount of attention, commitment and effort to win the Olympic medal; how you spend your time, together with the short and long term consequences, is different too!

So while the exact degree of required organisation health will vary depending on what you are asking of your organisation, no organisation sets out to be a couch potato!  “Lean and mean”, “efficient and effective”, “the best”, “market leaders” are the familiar phrases.  Yet you may sometimes be disillusioned that, despite all the resources at your disposal, your organisation does not reliably and consistently meet its objectives.  Can you say, hand on heart, that you know you have created an organisation that people are proud of and satisfied with - and back up your claim with objective data?  A recent Sunday Times survey showed that companies whose people rated the organisation highly had, over a 5-year period, share growth 40-50% higher than the average of the FTSE all-share listed companies.

How Can You Check the Health of Your Organisation?

At the beginning of this article I asked a few questions that will be familiar to those of you who periodically undertake a systematic check of your own health.  Let’s ask a few similar ones for the health of your organisation:

• How concise and compelling a way do you have to communicate the business's strategy?
• To what extent do all managers and staff believe the strategy is achievable, find it personally exciting, and share it concisely and compellingly with others?
• How far is the strategic plan translated into practical steps which are owned by specific individuals and well integrated into each individual's total work plan?
• As a business, how proactively do you develop your culture, especially when your strategy changes?
• How effective are all top and middle management in coaching all employees to demonstrate the stated company values?  Do you have stated company values?

These are just a few of the questions you should be considering if you want to make a systematic job of assessing the health of your organisation.  How fit is your organisation?  On a scale from 1, couldn’t be worse, to 5, world-class, how would you score your own organisation?  Click here to let us know.

What You Can Expect From a Full Health Check

See the boxes below for a full overview of the health check elements we would recommend you include in a full assessment, and for the ways in which you can use the results.  Over the next few issues of this newsletter we will be concentrating on one key area at a time and giving you a sense, not only of how the health check is carried out, but also of the action we would recommend you take, so that you can get your organisation really fit this year and improve your performance and results.

Shine Consulting is a partnership of business consultants brought together by a shared commitment to see people and organisations shine. 

We work with small, medium and large organisations whose leaders are excited by consciously designing and working towards an organisation where the people who work in it are consistently passionate, inspired and committed, and which produces results well beyond the predictable norm.  In short, an organisation that really shines. 

You can find out more about us and the work we do on our website, where you can also find a full archive of all the previous issues of this newsletter.