Aaron,
Thank you very much for posting this summary. I must admit that due to a very heavy schedule the past few months that I've not had an opportunity to keep up with very many of my discussion lists, including this one. Yet your summary caught my eye, and I found that it seems to be providing some surface validation to some work that I've doing over the past few years. Since 2002 I have been interested in what key elements drive organizational performance. It is a result of some of this work and my own interests that attracted me to this discussion list in the first place.
I spent 3 years reading and reviewing large scale research studies, including work by organizations such as <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Gallup</st1:place></st1:city>, Towers Perrin, and Watson Wyatt, and individuals such as James Collins, John Kotter, Donald Clifton, Marcus Buckingham, and Martin Seligman. Let's face it, there are a lot of different theories, approaches, and models as to what "works" to drive performance. Most people seem to be attracted to these differences; I was attracted to the similarities. I kept noticing that most of the research was saying pretty much the same things, just in different ways or were putting them together differently. So out of all of this reading I began to identify what I saw as common elements, and eventually came up with seven of them. They are as follows:
- Put People at the Center of everything you do; employees, customers, and community
- Build Trust as a foundation
- Allow Personal Responsibility through individual decision making
- Share a Vision of an Aligned Purpose, Values, and Goals
- Create Emotional Connections through Leadership
- Focus on Strengths and Accentuate the Positive
- Encourage Innovation, because good enough is not enough
However, these seven elements are more than just seven concepts that exist separately. One day as I was talking with a colleague of mine about what I was learning, I suddenly realized that these elements (and they were by no means formalized as above at the time) actually were linked together in a very special relationship similar to another model that I was very familiar with --- the American Indian Medicine Wheel that I had been studying for the past 10 or 15 years as part of reconnecting with my ancestry. I then began to put the concepts into the form of the Medicine Wheel to create a model. You can see the relationship of the elements in the model that I've developed here: http://www.resourcedevelopmentsystems.com/models.htm.
For those who are not aware of the concepts of the Medicine Wheel, the colors symbolizing the directions and the direction that a concept might occupy might vary from Nation to Nation. However, the Medicine Wheel that I have learned has Spirituality in the East, Emotional in the South, Physical in the West, and Mental in the North. The remaining directions are Down (Mother Earth), Up (Father Sky or the Sky Vault, which are not the same as Creator), and Center (Self and also The People).
As you can see, we have Vision in the East, or the location of Spiritual, which seems to support the notion which you shared in your summary that organizations can make use of their Purpose, Values, and Goals to help create a commitment to achieve that Purpose. This particular relationship was one of the very first areas that I began to see that connection between what others were saying, such as Collins (preserve the core; hedgehog concept, etc), and the Medicine Wheel.
When your discussion began to turn to using the basic tenets of spirituality and religion of positive attitudes, forgiveness, and tolerance, I again saw a relationship with another part of the model. Focusing on the Positive seems to be an extremely important component of organizational success, both in attitude about what will be accomplished (a link back to the Vision) and in how we get people connected to that Vision. It is through the positive relationships between employees and their managers that employees are connected (Leadership).
Finally, there was some discussion about tolerance of others beliefs and diversity efforts. I serve as the Diversity Chair for our local SHRM chapter, and I some times conduct diversity training for clients. I approach diversity not from the point of view of "appreciating differences," which was how I was trained to deliver diversity training back in the mid-90's, but rather from a business success premise. Diversity is about creating inclusion; inclusion helps create engagement; engagement drives performance.
We find that Trust occupies the position of Mother Earth on the model, and I do believe that Trust is the very foundation of all success. If you do not have Trust in an organization then it will not be highly successful for very long, if ever. Of the Four Behaviors that Build Trust we will find Acceptance (see the Trust Model at the above link). If we can not Accept others, then we will not be able to Build Trust with them. That acceptance must include the person's religion. Conversely, if that person is going to Build Trust with others it means that they must also accept that others may have different religious or spiritual beliefs from theirs. To push one's own beliefs on another would be to not Accept them, and would be a Behavior that Destroys Trust. I often say that those who Destroy Trust can't stay (but that is for a separate discussion).
I think that one of the things that fascinates me most about the 7 Elements of High Performance Model is just how interconnected each of the Elements are with each other, and the dynamics that are created from this relationship, just as the concepts are in the Medicine Wheel. To be honest, I'm still exploring all of the intricacies that I believe that this model holds. However, one thing that I believe that the Model does provide is a way to talk to business leaders about performance, not "touchy feely stuff" that seems to scare so many, and at the same time create an environment that is very respective of the individual while at the same time creating a community.
Again, thank you for your summary and for initiating this discussion, and thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts and this Model. It seems that after thousands of years that the Medicine Wheel still has lessons for us even today.
(c) 2007 permission denied to use this post in any other forum or in any way other than on the discussion list that it was originally posted.