Is Your Company Healthy?

Organizations are like the human body. They are intricate systems made up of extremely complex interactions between interdependent parts. If one part of the system isn’t working right, then other parts of the system are affected as well. The result is an imbalance in the overall human system.

When it comes to your company’s health, things may seem like they’re going well, or at least good enough. The question, though, is: How do you know that? When was the last time you gave your company a physical exam? Doing so might open an understanding around where there are problems before they become potential longer-term illnesses.

Your Company’s Health Check would consist of measures around four key areas: Employees, Customers, Revenue, and Processes. 

Without a diagnostic check, you operate off of assumptions which can lead you to fix a superficial wound vs. getting to a root cause. While a Company Health Check might show you something you really don’t want to know, not knowing is far worse, especially if you want to build both top-line revenue and a high-performance organization.

As an overview, here’s what you would learn from a Company Health Check: 

Employees: Your EKG. From a health perspective, the heart is considered a major organ. It’s a muscle that captures deoxygenated blood through the veins and moves it to the lungs, where the blood is then oxygenated. From there, blood is pumped throughout your body via veins and major arteries. This whole process is what gives your body the oxygen and nutrients it needs for ultimate health.

The heart of your company is your Employees. While it is leadership that sets the culture of an organization, the culture settles in the hearts of your employees. How engaged are your people? Does each employee know what s/he is accountable for? What are the cultural elements that are circulating throughout veins of your company? Are those elements healthy or tainted? If tainted, what’s the degree of the illness? How collaboratively are your people working together to create one entire system that works together seamlessly? To what degree are you giving your people the oxygen and nutrients they need to grow and develop? What are you doing to protect them from further infection, or if healthy, then what are you doing to sustain that health? What actions are you taking to increase the vibrancy of your company’s heart?

Customers: Your Vital Signs. Your Vital Signs are connected to your Core Customers and your Secondary Customers. What’s your company’s blood pressure? This depends on how valuable your customers find working with you. Are they staying with you? Are they literally delighted with the work you’re doing for them? Are you delivering on your Brand Promise? Customers are like your company’s respiratory system: They give life to your work. In turn, that feeds your existence. Checking up on your most profitable customer relationships to see how healthy those relationships are is of value, then, to your company. So what’s the temperature relative to your Core Customers?

Processes: Your Neurological System. Your body’s nerves, reflexes, and sense of balance are all signs of a healthy neuro-system or an underperforming one. Which key processes do you need to admit need improvement? What are the critical metrics you should be reviewing at your Weekly Meetings? How good are we at tracking our metrics so we don’t get blind-sided? Are your company’s systems and processes efficient? More importantly, then, are they effective? How easy is it to do business with you? To what degree do you have a collaborative culture where cross-functional problem-solving is the norm? How balanced is your financial discipline? These are the areas that most impact your company’s nerves, reflexes, and sense of balance.

Revenue: Your Overall Health Analysis. How’s your top-line revenue? Revenue is a result of excellence in the prior three areas, but it’s also fed by delivery on your Brand Promise Guarantee (so hopefully you have one) and it’s the result of having strategic discussions, followed by measured action, around your Winning Moves. The degree to which your teams are willing to challenge themselves to think from an innovative perspective is the degree to which you’ll create Winning Moves that become catalysts to your company’s continued growth. But doing this requires leadership—the right kind of leadership that grows their people’s ability to think strategically about the future, to create viable relationships with Core Customers, and to streamline internal systems and processes. 

A Company Health Check is Wholistic Medicine at its best. It lets you know the pulse of your company’s body, mind, spirit, and emotions. Just as Wholistic Medicine is about gaining the proper balance in life, so is a Company Health Check. The Health Check will give you a baseline of where things are so you can celebrate what’s going well and you can work on what might be getting in the way of higher levels of success. 

For those of you who know me or have heard me speak at conferences, you know that I believe leaders should be what I call “Inquisitive Explorers.” So be proactive Inquisitive Explorers and see what you might learn about your company’s health. Take the Company Health Check and discuss the results at your next Weekly Meeting…and celebrate what you discover.

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