Check The Vital Signs: Measure Your Organization for Peak Health
The construction industry is undergoing rapid changes, influenced by increasingly complex and faster-paced projects as well as challenges such as labor shortages and a growing need for development of next generation talent and leaders.
These struggles are further exacerbated by changing business trends such as tightening margins and changes in demand from owners in terms of project delivery and schedules. To respond to these industry shifts you need the right people and processes in place. Consequently, companies are increasingly prioritizing multiple strategic initiatives to increase organizational and leadership capacity.
The challenge is to ensure all strategic initiatives are moving the organization in the same direction. Organizational health is when a company’s people, operations, and business processes and functions are aligned with organizational vision and strategy. When united, leaders gain traction with their strategic initiatives that can lead to long-term effectiveness.
Organizational health is characterized by three key elements.
- A compelling vision and aligned strategy.
- Clarity around leadership and talent requirements, and how they support the desired culture and employee engagement.
- Well defined structure, governance process and operational consistency.
When coordinated, these provide a solid foundation for creating an enduring and resilient organization. Leaders will also see the impact on their bottom line. Profit is an outcome of organizational health, or how well company leaders align their processes, systems and people to their visions and strategies.
Introducing a New Solution
This assessment tool was created to help leaders gain better understanding of their own organizational health. Companies are at their peak health when all the systems in the model below line up with their vision and strategy, which can be measured using FMI’s peak organizational alignment (POA) survey, which is built around this framework.
How Does it Work?
FMI’s POA assessment is a tool that helps leaders identify how well their organizational processes are aligned to their vision and strategy. Problems in one area can influence other parts of the business, meaning that your focus should be on the whole company, not just one area.
Think of it as mapping the human body by systems – nervous, respiratory, muscular – but for organizations. Just as in the human body, all these systems need to work in harmony for an organization to be healthy, and even one system developing a problem can cause symptoms to appear in other areas.
Benefits of using the assessment
A structured assessment focused on your organization’s health can help you:
- Get a big picture view: Help leaders take a step back from the day-to-day to understand if where they spend their time is aligned with their vision and strategy.
- Find the source of issues: The symptoms are not always what needs to be addressed. This holistic view allows company leaders to identify blind spots in their organizations so that problems can be addressed at the source.
- Quickly coordinate leaders: Organize senior leaders around the most important challenges to aid in decision making and eliminate distractions, as well as discover initiatives that are not moving organizations closer to their visions.
- Discover competing priorities: Highlight misalignment with where resources are deployed or identify if initiatives are moving against each other.
- Measure improvements: Develop a baseline across the organization and measure the progress toward key initiatives.
Just as people need to prioritize annual health checks, leaders who regularly step back to assess their organization are more likely to have a healthy one. If you are interested in learning more, or trying out the Peak Organizational Alignment assessment for your organization, you can connect with an FMI consultant from the Leadership & Organizational Development practice.