HR Creating a High Performance Culture and Environment

"We are developing a high performance, achievement-based culture.  Without this methodology, I would expect us to be behind our competitors.”
Shenaz Khan |  GM People |  Rob Coombe | CEO |  BT Financial Group

"It is often difficult to unify a leadership team on improving the performance within a business. The high performance environment process provided powerful yet easily understood information on the factors effecting performance at Cisco. This process unified my team on the specific actions to improve performance."
Gerard Lithgow |  VP Enterprise Sales North East USA | Cisco

"The high performance diagnostic facilitated clarity on what actions needed to be taken in order to improve the performance of my team and why these actions would have the greatest impact. Importantly the process unified my senior executive team around these actions.”
Charlie Brown | Senior Executive | Accenture

For decades, Human Resource Leaders and HR Business Partners have struggled to "get a seat at the executive table" and have a measurable impact on the business. This struggle typically intensifies once HR is able to handle their key operational and administrative duties and wants to do more.

What should HR do to become a player in the business?

Many suggest improving business and financial acumen. Others look toward developing consulting skills to build deeper business partnerships. Both steps can and do add value; but there’s an additional skill set lacking in most HR organizations: the ability to answer one key question.

It is a question that cannot be answered solely from improved business acumen, deeper consulting skills, or tallied engagement survey results. And surprisingly, most HR professionals not only do not ask it, but cannot answer it.

“Given your unique circumstances, what “MOVE”, made today, will have the greatest effect on the performance of your organization or team?”

While financial acumen and consulting skills are necessary to transform HR into true business partners, and employee engagement can be a powerful productivity lever, we find that the inability of HR to understand which performance lever to pull is the greatest deterrent to taking the next step. With over 70 possible management actions available to change performance, how does HR help leaders select the correct one?

Based on over 16 years of high performance research with elite institutions such as Harvard, the U.S. Special Forces, Cisco, Accenture, MIT, NASA, and Juilliard, we can help you and your HR team identify the top two moves at your organization that will create the most improvement in performance.

Those clients around the world with whom we have worked to identify and execute these high performance actions tell us that they have:

• Increased factory productivity by 25%

• Gained over $500,000 in annual benefits

• Improved net profit contribution by $100,000 per month

• Raised Call Center revenue by 400%

Typically clients turn to LSA's High Performance Environment Diagnostic, Consulting, and Training to:

• Understand how to "get more" from their people

• Determine how to best execute their strategy from a "people perspective"

• Identify the best "moves" to get their organization to realize its stretch objectives

• Benchmark their current performance environment against high performance best practices

• Increase leadership accountability for performance improvement

• Understand, in detail, the dynamics affecting human high performance in their organization or team

After an initial education session, our usual approach involves 4 key steps:

1. Diagnose: Understand the existing performance environment using our proven High Performance Environmental Structure Diagnostic Tool.  The diagnostic enables leaders to quickly build a detailed picture of the current performance environment and accurately pinpoint key levers to improve performance.

   Typical outcomes include identifying:

   • Strengths and weaknesses of the current culture / performance environment
   • Likely accelerators and inhibitors to performance
   • Current and future ‘pressure’ dynamics that will most influence performance
   • Benchmark comparisons
      
2. Strategize the Two Key Moves: Review the diagnostic results with the Leader and the Executive Team and agree on the two key actions that, if taken, will result in the most dramatic improvement in performance across the organization.
    
3. Execute: Implement the two actions in a way that makes sense to your organization.
    
4. Measure: Re-test to monitor progress against success metrics and to continuously improve.

If you and your HR Team would like to learn how our high performance expertise has helped leading organizations increase business performance, please contact us.