Business Performance Is Much More Than What’s Showing Up In The Number$!

The desired results are well known and consistent across businesses of varying size, industries, ownership, and geographies - financial growth, profitability, market share, efficiency, return on investment, equity, net assets employed, etc. However, what is much less known, as I’ve learned over my decades of consulting, coaching, and applied research with both businesses and owners, leaders, managers, is their understanding, as well as lack of capitalizing, on those success shaping forces within their very own control. So, what are these ‘root causes’ that drive these financial number "effects" that businesses seek and must have to survive and succeed?

Here are four of the common ‘root causes’ that I continue to find in my work with organizations that drive these financial numbers. First, an increasingly disturbing ‘internal threat’ to the success of organizations is the much too common lack of genuine commitment to the organization’s vision and purpose that results in higher levels of alignment to the business’ performance expectations. This ranges from poor understanding or undisciplined execution of sound financial management practices, to marginal quality work (individual, team, function, and/or organization), to lack of collaboration. The latter motivation-based pattern is amazingly a much too frequently-occurring and increasing trend among people at all levels in organizations today. Recently, I was working with a nation-wide association of industry owners that continues to experience both sides of this pattern. Internally, the organization’s noble, vital purpose has attracted a high quality of passionate employees, board members, and supporters working harder and better on a daily basis. By dramatic contrast, the nature of their work involves efforts to involve public policy by Congress where the rampant self-interests/affiliations and divisiveness it produces versus responsible commitment to work together to solve America’s serious, damaging problems is extremely disheartening almost to the point of disgust among American citizens.

A second, related ‘root cause’ of business under-performance is the persisting pattern of people functioning, or more accurately stated, ‘dysfunctioning,’ based on their own personal preferences and habits, rather than effective practices. For sure, I’ve seen this for decades as a key differentiator between lower to average performing versus truly high performing individuals—those who significantly contribute to both high productivity and high satisfaction among those they work with, for and serve. At the present time, I am coaching more than two dozen manager/leader/owners and businesses where this self-motivated pattern has limited their success for years.

A third source of under-performance throughout the past few decades is the pace, unpredictability, and variety of changing circumstances that have posed a tremendous challenge for people and organizations. Those few individuals and organizations that have stretched beyond their ‘comfort zone’ to become more adaptable in both their strategies, processes, and personal practices have benefited while the vast majority that haven’t have struggled or self-destructed. I have found it astonishing that "CON-sultants" and corporations talk about making things ‘comfortable’ for employees as a guiding management "principle" (regardless of factors like the economy, employee generation, or company situation), when this leads to patterns like status quo, complacency that result in sub-optimized performance numbers!

And the fourth common cause of such sub-optimized performance is the lack of both effective self-management and development as well as that of people and situations based on a scale of favorability to unfavorability - whether involving the performance of people, the environment within which a business functions (internal and external), and/or the nature of technology/task to be managed. Recently, I began coaching a brilliant and seasoned business leader from a large multi-national corporation who said he learned more about managing during our less-than-a-day session together than he had through his entire career, including his MBA degree. And he is quite typical in many ways. I have yet to initially meet a manager or leader using a clear, proven model for comprehensive, total business success—though a number of clients I’ve worked with are now reaping the rewards from using it as their survival and success guide that virtually anyone can learn and apply!