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Why Organizational Health is So Important to Me

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Organizational health means different things to different work teams.

  • To executive teams, health means unity of purpose, consistency in communications and commitment to long-term profitability.
  • The the engineering department in a University, health means constant teaching, generous research grants and fair-minded professors.
  • To the R&D organization, health means robust collaboration, continuous learning and a healthy transfer of knowledge to decision makers.
  • To the small business. health means management of cash flow, hard work and a niche market.
  • To the entrepreneur. health means courage, extreme work ethics and multi-tasking.
  • To a church. health means commitment to the mission and creating a core membership motivated by love and openness.
  • To the family. health means reliable loving parents, stable income and consistent routines.

Organizational health is important to me because working on or being a member of an unhealthy team is usually horrible for almost everyone involved.  Unhealthy teams waste time, create unfair situations and can slow down progress.  It is important to have a healthy executive team but organization health only trickles down so far, depending on how large an organization is.

I’ve seen unhealthy church leadership altar lives for the negative, producing the exact opposite effect in the people they hope to minister to.

I’ve seen small business leaders push out ethical and intelligent employees in exchange for the corrupt yet loyal.

Leadership at every level should study and strive for health in their organization.

What are some tips at keeping an organization healthy?

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Organizational Health (for everyone else)

Is it just me or is organizational health viewed mainly as a senior management concern within many corporations? What about lower and middle management?

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An unhealthy and sometimes toxic work culture is depicted in the NBC TV comedy series The Office.  The incompetence of leadership and toxicity of this office is extreme for the sake of comedy but I wonder how many real life offices are not far from the reality that this team faces at Dunder and Mifflin Inc.  This office produces adequate revenue and profit so  senior management and HR doesn’t care how toxic and crazy the culture is?

“Toby is a part of HR which technically means he is from corporate so he really is not a part of our family.” – Michael Scott

The fact is that when there are several layers of leadership, even the most healthy and well-meaning team of executives and HR programs can not always stop toxic culture from dominating working teams.

Even in corporations with high performing executive teams a toxic culture can and often does periodically develop under them. Unhealthy cultures can come from the following sources (to name a few):

  • a void of leadership from overworked or stressed out middle managers
  • poor leadership from beginning supervisors and managers
  • cynical employees spreading gossip and discontent
  • competing managers and individual contributors looking out only for their next promotion

Working on a team that has poor health is often a lousy experience.  Even highly unified and well-functioning executive teams can not guarantee that sub-teams stay healthy long-term, they must rely on managers.

Fortunately, if things are healthy at the top than toxicity can not take over the company but it can make life hard for the people at or near the bottom.  Unhealthy work team cultures can cause unfair situations and considerable missed productivity which is a waste of company money and time.

I want to see an increased focus on middle and lower management organizational health.  Having a healthy executive team is often just not enough, trickle down health does not always happen and even when it does trickle down it is often not fast enough to protect the company from waste.

Do teams in your company get healthier at the top?

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Healthy R&D Organizations Major on Teaching

I’ve noticed that being a healthy means different things to different types of organizations.

  • To a small business, health means cash flow, strong teams and hard work.
  • To our new-born, health means a lot of mom’s milk and clean diapers.
  • To a family, health means a strong marriage, good nutrition and an active lifestyle.
  • To a church, health means that Jesus Christ at the center and supreme of all that happens.
  • For an R&D organization, one that is innovating and developing new products. I think health to a great degree means mostly open teaching.  Researchers teaching one another, researchers teaching their management and researchers teaching the manufacturing and business leaders exactly how to produce novel and new products. Researchers are essentially professional learners and if they don’t learn to teach their usefulness is limited. Patents if written well are designed to teach, in exchange for this teaching the government gives the patent owner a limited-time monopoly on the invention.

When turf wars, politics, secretiveness and credit stealing is the norm the health of the R&D organization is poor and its usefulness to a company diminishes quickly.

Being intelligent and hiring smart people is only so important, intelligence is undermined and made of little effect if the culture is toxic. To hear a lot more on this from Patrick Lencioni on this click here.

Leaders of innovative R&D organizations can encourage health by being a self-less teacher and by encouraging teams to teach. To teach continuously and with generous passion.  And remember to give credit when they do so.

What else does healthy look like in R&D organizations?

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