What is a Flourishing Organization?
We now shift our attention from a Flourishing Leader to a Flourishing Organization, but our framework remains the same. Like a Flourishing Leader, a Flourishing Organization has access to internal and external resources and relationships. But those resources and relationships look different for an organization than for an individual.
Flourishing Organizations focus first on their internal relationships and resources, knowing that internal metrics are leading, and external metrics are lagging. Or said another way, healthy and effective organizations make money. But revenue and profits are not an indication of health and effectiveness.
For organizations, the internal resources and relationships that are most important are the clarity and alignment across the four pillars of every organization:
VISION: the organization’s purpose, belief and/or destination.
JOURNEY: the organization’s processes and experiences
CULTURE: the organization’s people, culture, and values
RESULTS: the organization’s profits, metrics, and KPIs
If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll see this mirrors the 4 dimensions of a Flourishing Leader.
Vision => Spiritual
Journey => Mental
Culture => Emotional/Relational
Results => Physical
This isn’t an accident. Flourishing Leaders and Flourishing Organizations both understand the importance of alignment across these four dimensions. Let’s dig into each of the four.
VISION
What are we trying to accomplish? Why does our organization exist? The vision is the foundation of the organization. Many executives confuse the Vision with Results. One helpful rule of thumb is if your Vision statement has any numbers in it ($X in revenue, #Y customers, #Z people) then you have a Results metric not a Vision statement. Use that statement in the Results section. Your Vision statement should be about purpose. WHY are we doing what we are doing? Why should anyone (employees, customers, etc) care? How are we going to make the world a better place?
JOURNEY
How will we achieve our Vision? What strategies and processes do we need? The Journey can and should cover everything from the high-level strategy down to the standard operating procedures. But don’t try to document that all at once. Start at the highest level and then gradually work down into the details. Often the Journey can be broken in to 3 major phases:
Strategize: what path(s) will we take to achieve our Vision? What paths are we NOT going to take? What will we NOT do?
Standardize: what things do we need to do exceedingly well to execute this strategy?
What standard operating procedures do we need to define, document, and distribute?
Optimize: What would it look like to take this process to the next level? How could we delight our customers, employees, partners, and stakeholders?
CULTURE
How will we behave? What values will guide our behavior? Many leaders struggle with the Culture pillar. If the Journey pillar is WHAT we do, the Culture Pillar is WHO we are and HOW we behave. The organizational values define how successful people behave in the organization. Another way of thinking about the Culture pillar is the 4Ps. Vision = Purpose, Journey = Process, Culture = People, Results = Profit. In the Culture section, think about how you want people to be treated and how you want them to feel after interacting with your organization.
RESULTS
How will we measure our progress? This isn’t just financial metrics like revenue and profits. Every pillar can and should have its own metrics
Vision Metric(s) how will we know if we are achieving our purpose?
Journey Metric(s): how will we know if our processes are effective & efficient?
Culture Metric(s): how will we know if we are living out our values?
Results Metric(s): how will we know if all the pillars are working well together?
Every organization – both for profit and non-profit – has a vision, journey, culture, and results. For many organizations there are two sets … the vision, journey, culture and results we SAY we value, and the vision, journey, culture, results we actually value. The consequence is that for most organizations, their four pillars are not clear and aligned. Organizations that are unclear and/or misaligned across these four dimensions cannot flourish. These are the internal resources and relationships upon which Flourishing Organizations are built.
What are you building?
