Three Perspectives on Building a High-Performance Organization

Highlights from BlessingWhite’s appearances at the Society for Human Resource Management’s 61st Annual Conference.

The following three topics were presented in 2009 as Webcasts – you can view the recorded presentations in our webinar series.

Align Your Hamsters & Honeymooners: Practical steps to increasing workforce engagement

If you’re like many successful business people, you’re a problem solver. You see something wrong and jump to find a solution. Yet when it comes to employee engagement, that approach doesn’t necessarily yield the best returns. Take your disengaged employees: Are you spending too much time trying to ‘fix’ them? You may be better off coaching them out of the organization and instead investing in those employees who are somewhere in the middle — neither fully engaged nor totally disengaged.

Your Hamsters and Honeymooners are a critical group to target, but before we explore who they are and what you can do to boost their engagement, let’s step back and consider what full engagement looks like.

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Securing the Future: Taking succession planning to the next level

Amid today’s unpredictable and often painful business conditions it might be tempting to hunker down for short term gains and temporarily shelve succession planning efforts.

Don’t.

It’s a move that can short-change your organization’s future. Instead revisit your succession planning approach. In the spirit of Joseph Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’, look for innovation — the type that constraints like reduced budgets and leaner workforces can spur.

A common definition

What do we mean by succession planning? The strategic scouting, selection, alignment, engagement and development of people to support business priorities — in other words, doing all you can to ensure you have the right people in the right jobs at the right time!

Let’s take a look at what the ‘right people’ need to be able to do.

 

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Developing Smart Doers into Smart Leaders: Avoiding the ‘my way’ trap

Your smart doers provide the brainpower for making things faster, better, cheaper, smaller and easier. They are highly educated individuals with specialized skills and knowledge. Although they work in a wide variety of functional areas and industries, they share common characteristics and have strongly held views on how their work should be done. (The six common characteristics are described in our Leading Technical Professionals report.)

Scientists, software developers, financial analysts, engineers and the like — you can call them technical professionals or expert employees, but regardless of labels, it takes deft leadership, not supervision, to unleash and align their energy and talents. They are not an easy bunch to lead.

 

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