Most critical business issues are composed of other numbers combined into a single, easy-to-focus-on number like market share or margin. Margin, for example, is income, itself a sum, less cost, which is also a sum of all the expenses of providing the product or service. To improve performance at the Organization Level, identify a critical business issue and use it both to focus your investigation and to frame your recommendations for action. Deconstructing the critical business issue into its component parts can help lead you to where the biggest problems are and provide you with metrics for assessing whether your intervention is working to close the gap.

While you will often be working on a Worker/Individual or Process Level business issue, such as reducing the cost of recruiting and retaining talent, your ability to show how that project affects margin will effectively tie your work to a higher-level critical business issue that senior managers will care about.

Tip: When you work at this level, leadership typically relies on expert consulting resources with wide brand recognition, such as McKinsey or Bain. What experts do the executives in your organization turn to for advice? It may be wise to reference their publications and techniques when making recommendations or proposing a particular approach.

To look at the organization’s internal structure and external realities, performance improvement specialists use environmental and internal scans.

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To understand what is driving strategy and decisions for the organization, the performance improvement practitioner needs the big picture of how the organization fits into its industry. We also need to understand the business environment that has created the risks and opportunities the organization faces. It is useful to create a working summary of our findings so we can validate them, and keep referring to them as we work.

Performance improvement specialists also map the structure of the organization—not merely with an organization chart, but with a diagram that shows the major divisions of the organization, such as research and development, manufacturing, and sales, and how they relate to each other. A truly useful map will also show key cross-functional processes and feedback loops.

What are the current challenges, obstacles, and limitations facing the organization? A challenge might be that a significant competitor is bringing products to market faster and at a lower cost. Obstacles could include a shortage of investment capital for expanding a key manufacturing line. A limitation might be stringent environmental regulation in states where the company operates. Create a map or summary of what you learn as an ongoing reference for your work. The section on mapping the organization that follows shows a sample map.

Major opportunities and initiatives are also critical business issues. These may be strategic-level, organization-wide initiatives, like a change in market focus, or customer strategy, such as the launch of a “customer-first” initiative. Perhaps a new core product or process is being introduced, like implementing electronic medical records for a large health-care system or an expansion from an international to a multi-national organization.

Often, clients ask for a solution without specifying the business issue. You may have to be persistent to uncover it, but an issue is always there. Identifying the issue and being able to articulate it clearly is key because the issue is both the target and the engine that will power your project.

Politics is the process of influencing others to make decisions, support ideas, and advance goals. It is how we really get things done, and is the glue behind the organization chart. The important things to recognize about organizational politics are:

In our view, there are two positions people play in organizational politics: destructive and constructive.

So how do you succeed at constructive politics? First, it’s important to understand where you are positioned in the political landscape. In the organization, or in the part of it you are dealing with, who has power? That power may be formal, due to the person’s position, or informal, due to factors such as expertise, personality, reputation, or a strong ability to form alliances. What relationships, both personal and professional, and alliances do those with power have? Who are the decision-makers in the organization, and who are the influencers and advisors they rely on to inform them before they make decisions? The decision-makers are often obvious from the organization chart, but their influencers and advisors are not. We typically uncover this information by asking people, and by observing interactions among members of the organization. Internal consultants have an advantage here—they often already know, or know whom to ask, as may your clients.

Second, identify the political stance of the people with power who are likely to be involved in the change you want to make:

This is an important activity because it will enable you to know what kind of responses to expect, and who to work with versus who to work around. You don’t want to put a spectator in a key role in an implementation plan, for example. One of us had the unhappy experience of implementing a cross-functional initiative with a win-lose player in a key liaison role. This can’t always be avoided, but you want to know what to watch out for and what to lobby for. And while you are evaluating the political positions of key people, what is your own?

Third, develop your influence strategy. This includes both communication and coalition building. Savvy performance consultants plan who to talk to and in what order to gain the ear of those whose cooperation is critical. This technique is referred to later in this chapter as “divide and conquer.” If the people you need to influence don’t share the same goals, look for a way to bring them together to create a coalition. A good start is to use one-on-one meetings to try out ideas on an individual, and ask, “What do you think?” “Why do you think that?” “What is your position?” and “How do you feel about X point of view?” Once you understand that one key person is really concerned about customer service and another cares about reducing turnaround time, you can pull together a solution that addresses both concerns, and build a coalition of support for your project (B. Lawton, personal communication, July 2008).

(B. Lawton, personal communication, July 2008)

Geary Rummler’s Organization Maps. The Anatomy of Performance is a map of the organization and its super-system (Rummler, 1995). Figure 4.1 shows the organization and its relationships with suppliers, markets, competition, and the economic, regulatory, and business environment. The external part of the super-system includes government/regulation, the economy, and society, the market, the competition, and resources such as capital, labor, suppliers, and expertise. The internal part of the super-system shows the organization’s key processes as well as interactions among departments. This will help you, and often your client, see all the elements of a dynamic system that has a powerful influence over everything that happens within the organization, and assess how the elements impact the business issues you are trying to address.

Judith Hale’s Performance Consulting Job Aids. We have found Hale’s Hierarchy Job Aid an excellent tool for doing a high-level assessment of how well an organization is functioning as a whole (Hale, 1998, pp. 128-131). It works as well with governmental and not-for-profit organizations, as with corporate clients. Table 4.1 shows only the first portion, which addresses congruence and clarity—what we call alignment in the rest of this chapter. The job aid includes:

In addition, the job aid lists a half dozen other useful areas to investigate. Together the model and the job aid help to assess whether the organization currently has the capacity to achieve its goals, and if it does not, how to build capacity so the goals can be reached.

The Balanced Scorecard Job Aid (Hale, 1998, p. 120) is helpful for targeting key business issues at the Organization Level, scoping the problem, and guiding a client to prioritize where to invest limited resources. It also provides good data for measuring the results of a performance improvement project.

Business Logic Analysis. The model in Figure 4.3 shows an external scan with general trends, industry trends, key threats and opportunities, and an internal scan with finance, strategy, customer, product, process, and infrastructure (Kearny & Silber, 2006). It will give you a clear understanding of what the business is trying to do and show how to find the metrics the organization uses to assess how well it’s doing. You can obtain the full job aid on the web at www.silberperformance.com under Presentations.