3
Drinking from a Firehose Wastes a Lot of Water
The organizational landscape has undergone tectonic shifts in the last 15 years. Despite our exponentially greater connectivity and perceived collaboration, productivity and employee development have remained stagnant. Nearly every organization invests considerable resources toward improvement initiatives. They all want to scale up for growth by improving their workforce. But in the past two years, only 8 percent of business initiatives met all expectations, with $70.6 billion allocated in 2016 alone, up nearly 35 percent since 2013.
Throwing more money at a problem isn’t the solution.
What the data tells us is managers and leaders are not being developed the right way. Schedule as many meetings and create as much content as you want—the symptoms of an ailing organizations will still persist.
Organizations need to stop and ask a few critical questions: What is the source of the problem? What are the problems and challenges? If you ask better questions, you tend to get better answers. How will your organization need to develop and adapt for the future?
Imagine a 16.9-ounce water bottle filled to the brim (this represents demands). Water is the fuel of life and a perfect representation of the fluid demands of a full life—family, friends, creativity, new ideas, sales projections, meetings, deadlines, hobbies, health, joy, and even happiness. Now the objective is to pour this water bottle into a glass that has the capacity of 15 ounces (your capacity). What will the result be? (See Figure 3.1.)
FIGURE 3.1 Our cups are overflowing
Most of us will pour as much as we can into our glass, hoping the really important stuff doesn’t spill over. We might even try to wait for the water in the glass to evaporate so we can squeeze in the last 1.9 ounces. But who are we kidding? You can’t just turn off the demands of a full life.
We repeatedly witness this mentality across the organizational spectrum. Most attempt to manage this by adding more layers of information from the top down: “We need more sales training. We need more leadership training. We need better management processes. Our workflow needs streamlining. Let’s send out another e-mail explaining the system again. Just keep giving more information!”
What if we all paused and accepted the inconvenient truth: Our people are drowning from the increasing demands. There’s tremendous value in prioritizing tasks to work more efficiently, but as you will see shortly, it doesn’t address the source of the problem. Having helped hundreds of organizations optimize performance and productivity, we know that asking people to wear more hats and juggle too many tasks usually leads to sloppy work and burned-out employees. If you figure out which hat fits them best and increase their capacity to handle whatever is thrown at them, they will thrive under pressure.
So let’s analyze these persistent performance problems more closely.
1. Demands Are Increasing, Capacity Is Shrinking
We were recently speaking to a state-run government organization. The executive director addressed the staff before we went on stage. She said:
I want to let you all know that I am expecting a lot from you. In doing so we will be providing all the tools and resources needed to manage this. We are expecting you to do more with less, and to be honest, we will continue to ask more of you.
The common trend across every industry and every organization is to do more with less.
If you think about it, no species has arguably achieved more, with less innate ability, than humans. If you ask any anthropologist, they will tell you the only superior physical traits we possess are endurance running and a steely digestive tract. Civilization was built on the evolution of ideas and their application.
Increasing demands, shrinking capacity.
When an organization thinks of doing more, it’s in terms of revenue growth, clients served, products made, products created, and general innovation—the collective output of any enterprise. People, time, and money are the input side of the equation. We’ve been far too fixated on value engineering input, instead of focusing on what produces the best output.
A great example of this is the legendary Palace of Versailles near Paris. It is one of the most marvelous properties in the world and is staggering to comprehend. It was the epicenter of the kingdom of France from 1682 to 1789 when King Louis XIV decided to build and glorify his majesty through unrivaled opulence and splendor. This project took an estimated 50,000 workers over 50 years to build. The sheer magnitude of manpower and dedication is almost impossible to fathom today. The hallmark of modern society is to evolve at an exponential level with less labor, while also producing more capital.
Gordon Moore co-founded Intel in the late 1950s and proposed one of the most radical theories of the twentieth century—Moore’s law—which states that computer processing power will double each year until we reach a singular moment where technological productivity will exceed human output (Figure 3.2). Not only can your smartphone process more information than Skylab, but it costs 0.0001 percent the amount of one of the most powerful portable supercomputers of the late 1970s. Moore’s law doesn’t apply to the human condition, but it’s all too evident in today’s technological ecosystem.
FIGURE 3.2 Human capacity is lagging behind technology.
Our collective focus has been completely obliterated by these new shiny screens that we are forced to interface with every waking moment:
- Our average attention span is eight seconds.
- We send 269 billion e-mails a day; that is up from 215.3 billion in 2016.
- The average smartphone user taps, swipes, or clicks their phone 2,617 times a day.
Not only are companies expected to produce more with less resources, but our brains are expected to process more than they were ever designed to. Just type “distracted driving tests” into YouTube and see what happens when humans try to multitask while driving.
We believe organizations will always want to do more with less, and we believe they can succeed at doing this if they start to look at how you build the best human beings instead of buying the best technology.
Your people know more information than ever before but rarely have the time or opportunity to apply it. We must teach our people how to build a better container for creative productivity. Capacity is not innate; you need to build it. Some people start with larger capacities, but optimum capacity is shaped and strengthened through better foundational health.
We are always amazed by how the most progressive and enlightened corporate cultures are designed and built. We see basketball courts, Nerf guns in the office, pet-friendly work environments, remote working, flex hours, and even craft beer on tap! But behind closed doors, every executive tells us what we already suspected—performance goals are still falling short. Sure, these amenities may attract better talent, but they don’t build better people. Every human wants to learn and wants to grow. People yearn for a self-actualized life that aspires to the best versions of themselves. But what we all need to learn more than ever is how to build capacity, because we are all asked to do more with less.
Every organization wants to drive certain key metrics, whether they be engagement, loyalty, creativity, innovation, hard work, growth, happiness, or health. If you truly want these things, you have to teach your people what they need to know in order to accomplish them. Skills training or the occasional hour-long webinar won’t satisfy the unquenchable thirst for enrichment.
Information overload is not learning. Endless webinars, manuals, surveys, and e-mails are only diminishing our attention spans and diminishing our retention levels. If you enlist in the US Air Force and are selected for the pilot training program, you spend weeks learning how to use a firearm in basic training. Then you log thousands of simulated and live flight hours to attain the qualifications to pilot an aircraft. Your drill sergeant doesn’t e-mail you a three-page PDF illustrated guide or send you a link to a YouTube video on how to pilot an F-16 that goes 1,300 mph. Doesn’t a PDF- and YouTube-based training approach sound woefully inadequate for the performance output expected from our brave and capable service members?
Learning is not absorbing information and regurgitating it. Learning is kinetic and built through careful repetition and practice. Most people know how to type on a computer today because they use it every day. I distinctly remember my dad writing his first book by hand! He was faster at handwriting, and since he never used a computer, he used the most efficient method at hand.
There Is So Much Noise, but Little Action
Increase your people’s capacity, and they can handle the increasing demands and also have the flexibility to prioritize and adapt to the fluid demands of today’s market. Take a quick look at the fish in the tiny bowl (Figure 3.2). Do you think the fish has much room to maneuver in that small bowl? Imagine if the same fish were living in a 15-gallon aquarium? Imagine if you had a five-gallon bucket to contain 16.9 ounces of daily demand? We don’t just need extra capacity for our minds; we need it for our psyches as well. If we don’t feel boxed in by our increasing workloads, and if we have 10 times more space to think and innovate, we will feel more capable.
We Are Tool Makers, but Do We Know How to Use the Most Valuable Tool?
Computers are the most remarkable tool we have ever come up with, and it is the equivalent of the bicycle for our minds.
—Steve Jobs
In the 1990 documentary Memories and Imagination: Pathways to the Library of Congress, Steve Jobs recounts a study he read about locomotion. In this study, published in Scientific American, the goal was to identify which species required the least amount of energy to travel one kilometer. The condor was the most efficient, and humans were hovering around the middle of the pack. Fortunately, someone decided to perform the same test against a human on a bicycle. Even with a crude turn-of-the-century model, a person with a bike was the clear winner of the locomotion trials. Jobs then relates that profound insight to the oncoming digital revolution:
And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
Jobs often said that what separates us (humans) from other species is that we are tool builders. We will always seek ways to make things better, faster, and, most of all, easier.
Despite the early triumphs of the Apple II and Macintosh, the information superhighway went into relative overdrive when the iPhone hit shelves in 2007. Only 10 years later, 60 percent of the world accesses the Internet through a mobile device every day. Imagine life without always-on social media, e-mail, and a personal computer just a swipe away. Never before has one person had the ability to consume this much information with next to no physical effort. Needless to say, our brains are fundamentally ill-equipped to handle this daily bombardment—let alone how to act on any of it.
Jobs and other tech pioneers have vastly improved the efficiency and output of the modern world. But what we must remember is that these are ultimately tools—devices or instruments to carry out a particular function. Currently, we are beholden to the tools, in many cases allowing them to control us. Tools were meant to be used by us, not vice versa. There’s never been a better time to upgrade our capacity to enable us to use these powerful tools more effectively.
No technology or future technology will ever come close to matching human creativity, adaptability, flexibility or compassion.
—Dr. Phil Nuernberger, author of Strong and Fearless
2. Stress Is Melting Us Down
We Are Both the Source and the Solution for Stress
Stress management, mindfulness, meditation, and conscious capitalism are all buzzwords floating around organizations trying to battle the stress monster gobbling up everyone’s emotional energy. What is stress exactly? Does your culture show troubling signs of stress? Is stress good or bad? Is it possible to eliminate stress altogether?
Stress
We are starting to understand the physiological impacts and psychological triggers rooted in chronic stress. There is compelling evidence showing that we have more stress today than ever before. More and more people aren’t able to regulate the mounting pressure. Our psyches are starting to resemble old worn-out basketballs. They either are about to explode from too much pent-up anxiety or are outright deflated from trying to bear the weight of it.
Your parents or grandparents are probably quick to judge today’s generation for not having to work nearly as hard as they did. In some obvious respects, they had it so much harder. They didn’t have the ease of instant communication or access to the entire world’s information at their fingertips. But despite how much less physically taxing today’s environment is, its psychological toll is far greater. We rely on our intellect more than our brawn to earn a place in society more than any previous generation.
So, what does this have to do with stress? The real reason for all this rampant increase in anxiety and stress, along with record levels of depression and mania, is the overwhelming complexity of our interconnected world. It is so severe that according to the American Psychological Association, teens reported higher average stress levels (5.8 on a 10-point scale) than adults (5.1) for the very first time.
Why is this happening? Are there more lions, tigers, and bears to dodge? Is the plague or risk of infection lurking around the corner? No, in fact we are statistically safer than ever before—despite what your local news programming might tell you. What has changed is the overstimulation and processing our brains endure on daily basis. These stressor inputs are called mind chatter and determine how we process and perceive immediate threats.
What If We Simplified Stress?
Stress is physiological not psychological. Stress is merely a symptom of a precieved threat, and it differs greatly for each one of us. Some people are fearful of public speaking and can quickly experience enough stress to induce physical nausea or vomiting—a physical symptom. Some of us are incredibly stressed out about possible catastrophes—like an asteroid hitting the planet or a devastating earthquake. But almost all of us can relate to the mounting stress of having way too much on our minds at any given moment. Our weekdays become carefully timed routines that are already stressful enough to maintain and downright debilitating if we ever deviate from them in the slightest.
Now that we’ve established that stress is physiological, let’s let out a collective exhale. There’s hope after all, because we can control it! Stress doesn’t have to dictate our reactions and how we get through the day. Stress can be managed by building resilience and mindfulness into our day. We can conquer stress by developing thought patterns that recycle potential stressors into motivational fuel.
Stress is too harmful to our minds and bodies to ignore any longer. Building capacity will give you and your people the ability to cope with stress.
In later chapters, we will talk about focus, attention, and rest. If you teach yourself how to get better rest and focus on the right outcomes, your stress will diminish and hopefully curb a dependence on various forms of self-medication (such as alcohol and prescription drugs). Let’s arm your people with the ammunition to fend off those lions, tigers, and bears in the modern jungle of complexity.
3. We Over-Rely on Skills and Talent
Most of us have enjoyed playing a spirited game of Jenga. If you haven’t yet, each player’s goal is to remove one block from a 54-block tower, and place it on top, without the whole structure tumbling down. There is even a delightful life-sized Jenga where the pieces are much larger and the tower quickly reaches a height where you have to use a step stool to reach the top. Regardless of the version, the outcome is always inevitably the same. Just don’t be left holding the last block.
Jenga
But imagine if the rules were modified and allowed for players to expand the foundation by adding blocks to the side. Instead of a teetering top-heavy tower of 54 blocks, you could have a large pyramid constructed from 154 blocks that’s nearly indestructible.
Recently a news outlet interviewed our company On Target Living about organizational development and asked what kind of companies need capacity training. We couldn’t help but chuckle a bit since we get this question fairly often. Most people assume that the people we are talking about or working with are the folks who are considered high performers—the executive team or even the future rising stars. The reality is that everyone needs this training. When trained, everyone in the entire organization will rise up. The tide of increased capacity will raise all ships, and each piece of the puzzle must be notched just right to make the whole enterprise thrive.
In the same interview we talked about working with a sand and gravel association—people responsible for making the aggregate material to build buildings, roads, and structures out of concrete and cement. The very foundation of our country is built with these elemental compounds. One bedrock principle is that you can’t build a strong structure without a solid foundation. Construction companies know you can’t build a skyscraper without having the best concrete and steel anchoring it at the bottom.
Relying on skill set training and talent alone is like constructing a building from the top down—it’s never going to stand the test of time. We hear this more often than you’d think. Let’s just go find the best people and everything will solve itself. These companies pay, interview, and assemble esteemed committees to interview and hire the most talented individuals. Once they hire the right people and put them in the right seats, what’s the next step?
Over the past 20 years most organizations have created the best departments to find, interview, and hire the best of the best talent. But in this infinitely more complex and demanding landscape, organizations are just hoping the Jenga tower doesn’t crumble.
Talent is critical, but you can’t go very far with people who don’t know the best way to apply it. People who have the greatest capacity for change and application are the ones you want inside an organization. Resiliency is a growing skill that organizations are trying to develop. But if you read the definition of resiliency, it states you must have the capacity to be resilient.
It was once extremely critical for organizations to train their people on skills, and it will continue to be critical in the future, but now that training information is in overwhelming abundance. Much like the written word or a byte of digital storage, its value is based on its scarcity. Leadership, management, and sales consulting firms have 2 million different ways to teach and train. So, are you investing more in these methods because they are important, or because they worked 15 years ago?
Ted St. Martin, a retired dairy farmer, still holds the Guinness World Record for most consecutive free throws made—an astounding 5,221 made in seven hours and 20 minutes.
Do you think Ted is a great basketball player or would be the most valuable player on a team? He would be the first to tell you that he could barely hold his own in a pickup game at your local health club without getting a shot blocked or having the ball stolen every other play. In basketball you must run, jump, dribble, pass, anticipate, and shoot at the right time. If you assembled a basketball team solely based on specialty skills, then you would probably pick world record holders in free throws, high jump, and sprinting. Obviously this team would be a train wreck because they aren’t well-rounded basketball players; they’re just elite performers of one particular skill. Organizational success isn’t based on a smattering of isolated skills. It’s based on elevating the level of play for all the interconnected disciplines throughout.
Mastery is certainly important, and we should all strive for it in moderation. But no amount of mastery is going to give your people the dexterity to handle all the ever-changing demands that emerge in today’s economy. There were plenty of programmers that mastered any given language before it was rendered obsolete. The best developers can assimilate and adapt their experiences by having a greater capacity for changing with the current and rolling with the punches so they’re always ready for what’s next.
4. Engagemnet is Lousy
We need to put the passion back into employee engagement.
Passion is the genesis for all creativity and innovation. Lack of passion isn’t a result of organizational practices alone. Nearly every time we look around and try to make eye contact with someone in public, they are either looking down at their phone or just staring blankly ahead—going through the motions. Engagement isn’t just a metric on an annual survey. You walk into some organizations and you can immediately feel the air teeming with energy and vitality. Others just zap the energy right out of you.
Employee engagement is undeniably anemic, with a meager 33 percent engagement across all industries. This reminds us of the campy cult classic film Office Space, in which the main character, Peter Gibbons, hates his soul-sucking job at the software company Initech. During one scene, he meets with two consultants and explains what a typical work week looks like:
Well I generally come in 15 minutes late; I use the side door so my boss doesn’t see me. From there I space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk and act like I am working. In a given week, I only actually do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.
Office Space is intended to be a satirical portrayal of the typical white-collar desk-jockey lifestyle. Lousy engagement stats tell us that reality has already arrived.
Many people work to maintain a steady paycheck and provide for their families, but with the newest workplace studies we see that the core motivation for people’s professional life is fulfilling their purpose. They aren’t driven by the satisfaction of seeing their weekly paycheck deposited or the rare pat on the back for finishing a big project they never understood in the first place. They want to know that their tireless hours of work amount to something substantial and impactful.
The Bobs from Office Space (1999)
At this juncture, it’s also important to distinguish between the words fun and engagement. Just because something is fun, doesn’t mean you are engaged. Sure, binge-watching your favorite crime show may feel fun, but it’s not engaging. Conversely, fun is not an essential part of engagement. Anyone who has learned to play an instrument for the first time knows how endlessly frustrating and nerve-racking it can be just to tune it properly. Playing becomes fun and engaging after years of practice and knowing all the nuances required to play the instrument well. Engagement is a very diverse metric. It’s fun, challenging, purposeful, and acute awareness all at the same time.
Engagement is the real first step in creating the successful culture you desire. If you don’t engage your people, it is damn near impossible to educate and create meaningful action. Let’s start building people because it’s not only the best strategy for your organization but also the right way to earn trust and respect. We see it all the time when we review exit interviews for organizations with high turnover. The overwhelming reason people leave an organization is because they felt they weren’t being engaged. They didn’t feel they were being used to their full potential. They didn’t think management cared about them as people. Engagement is the first step in transformation. It’s time to build everyone’s capacity for passion and start building each other up the right way.
Engagement + Education + Action = Transformation
5. Our Health Is Embarrassing
Let’s say it like it is: the health of corporate America is embarrassing. We are living longer than ever before, but the overall quality of our lives has taken a nosedive.
Our health is the elephant in the room!
The future of our health is rather bleak if we continue down this unsustainable path (Figure 3.3). We all want to live longer lives but maintain a reasonable quality of living. We may not control how long we live, but we can and should do everything we can to preserve our life’s quality. Employee health and wellness impact organizations much more than you may imagine. The law of diminishing returns applies not only to adding more people to any production system, but to their health as well. A common example is figuring out the optimal amount of factory line workers for any given part of the industrial process. At a certain point, adding more people to the line actually diminishes output—way too many cooks in the kitchen. The same rule applies to your people’s ability to produce. If they are out sick every other week, or just trying to keep their heads off their desks when they are in for a full week, it’s insanity to expect them to handle a full workload.
FIGURE 3.3 Aging well.
This isn’t a matter of getting to it later. If we don’t start taking our people’s health seriously and building their capacity to do more, achieving any business objective will be tough sledding indeed.
We were working with a medium-sized insurance company recently. We interviewed the CEO at length about his strategy and tactics for improving his people’s health. He said, “My culture isn’t really into organic food.” He assumed that since his people were unhealthy, they clearly had little to no interest in their own health and well-being. That’s when we replied, “Your people will perform better if they feel valued and healthier here. We all spend at least 30 percent of our lives working. Imagine if you and your organization had greater energy, health, and vitality, how would this impact your organization?”
The real challenge and confusion is a lot of business leaders aren’t trained to teach their people about living healthier lives. It’s not a prerequisite for climbing the corporate ladder. Countless programs tell you what to talk about and what to do, but very few show you how.
Medical Illiteracy
Two critical life lessons are not taught in our school systems: how to manage personal finances and how to manage personal health.
We learn about statistics, algebra, essay writing, social studies, and history—but not how to balance a budget or how many hours of sleep to get each night. We probably all remember spending a week in third grade talking about the food pyramid and have a cursory understanding of how digestion works—but not how to actually eat well.
A younger relative of ours reported that calculus is now a required class for all business majors at Michigan State University. After spending a decent amount of time in business, we have never needed to bust out a graphing calculator and figure out the derivative curve of a particular function. The deduction and critical thinking reinforced by calculus is enriching no doubt, but rarely will it be used in application. Your health is your most important asset, and nurturing its growth can only come when we are taught about it.
We mismanage our money and health every single day. Medical illiteracy is simply not an option with the rampant increase of disease and illness across our nation. Doling out more and more copays for needless doctor visits will only increase prescription drugs and diminish quality of life. The more you know, the better questions you can ask, and the more prepared you will be for whatever may come your way.
Many organizations have a biometric screening called “knowing your numbers.” But how would an employee improve their numbers if they don’t even understand what they are? We aren’t recommending you spend hours upon hours researching every disease known to the human race, but you can’t be illiterate either.
Do you know what your homocysteine or high sensitive CRP measure? What is your resting heart rate and what does this mean regarding stress management? Did you know that 65% percent of all heart attacks occur with normal cholesterol levels? Did you know that a low testosterone level for both men and women may be due to high levels of stress and lack of rest?
These are the important metrics that most people are heavily confused by or oblivious to.
Hacking versus Methodology
In the sports world, especially golf, the word hack is used to describe someone who is not skilled or who lacks the ability to perform at a consistent level. Hacking has a slightly more positive connotation in the tech world. Elite hackers are revered for their creative exploits and shortcuts into secure systems and for extracting data without leaving any traces behind. They are twenty-first-century cat burglars exalted for their virtual cunning.
That mentality has seeped into the world of human performance in the form of biohacking—testing your own biology to see what outcomes you can create. This mindset is fueled by our insatiable desire to for instant gratification and quick fixes.
Quick, Easy, Effortless, No Work
It’s the same mentality that launched a thousand late-night infomercials. Lose weight without exercising? Doesn’t that sound too good to be true? Enough people will buy because it reinforces what they want to hear. But it will fail like the other 46,750 zero-effort weight-loss schemes before it. Your people need a plan to master their own health and wellness—not a get-thin-fast bill of goods. The key to optimal and sustainable performance is practice—not hacking.
If you teach a man to fish, he’ll never go hungry again. Let’s teach our people how to value and maintain their health so they feel fulfilled and optimized. Hacking your way to the answer and skipping all the lessons along the way is not how we learn. We’re wired for overcoming challenges and obstacles on the road to enlightenment. This is the only way we attain wisdom.
Health-Care Costs
We spend 18 percent of our GDP on health care—roughly $3.2 trillion. That’s more than the entire GDP of 22 countries! It’s almost insulting to call it health care, because our health outcomes are not getting any better despite an expected 5 percent annual increase for the foreseeable future.
Here is a list of the top 15 lifestyle-related conditions for which Americans take medications that suck productivity and cost organizations the most money. Seventy percent of Americans take at least one prescription medication to treat the following and more than 50 percent take two:
- High cholesterol
- Hypothyroidism
- Hypertension
- Acid reflux/GERD
- Type 2 diabetes
- Pain/Inflammation
- ADHD
- Fibromyalgia
- Psoriasis
- Arthritis
- Depression
- Asthma
- Sleep
- Bone health
- Digestive health
Almost all these conditions are lifestyle related. Medications taken for these issues merely treat the symptoms of chronic poor health. Two of the newest and fastest-growing medications are fueled by the chronic stress epidemic sweeping across the corporate landscape:
- Antidepressants (10–12 percent of the population; 25 percent for women in their 40s and 50s)
- Medications to treat attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (adults receiving prescriptions for ADHD has doubled in the past several years, not to mention the adults using it without a script.)
It is estimated that the amount of ADHD medication sold in 2020 will total $17.5 billion. To put that number in perspective, coffee (America’s favorite stimulant) brings in $30 billion annually.
This is the 10-ton elephant in the room, suffocating your profitability and performance. Employers invest billions of dollars in health and wellness solutions, creating benefit programs that try to manage risk and provide value to the employees, yet health and performance outcomes have not improved at a commensurate rate. We have better access to premier hospital systems, highly trained health professionals, and cutting-edge medical technology. So why do we keep falling down the list of world’s healthiest countries?
What if the problem isn’t health-care policy, the environment, or incentives in the workplace? What if the real problem is our mindset on health and performance in the workplace? What if our mindset on health and performance was similar to the mindset on leadership, management, marketing, and sales?
We cannot fix the health-care problem by simply making our health-care system more affordable and efficient. Imagine if everyone looked at health care from a new perspective? Having more healthy people should be our goal, not more health-care options!
All companies want a healthier workforce, but the strategy is siloed off to the HR staff or voluntary committee. It’s rarely even mentioned in the initial onboarding process let alone a key component of ongoing training and development. How can we expect better health to underscore better performance when it’s not integrated from day one!
We worked with a company that has an amazing learning and development platform. It’s the centralized platform to grow and evolve their workforce and is focused on customer service, teamwork, time management, and leadership.
They also have an initiative to cut health-care costs since it is the second highest expense next to wages. But this excellent initiative was completely separated from their award-winning learning and development platform. It’s almost like storing your silverware and napkins in the kitchen, but stashing the plates and cups down in the basement—it doesn’t make for an enjoyable dining experience. This strategy hamstrings any organization because it doesn’t tie health to performance in a concrete way. You need to connect the dots and show people how better focus, energy, and drive create endless opportunities for growth and prosperity.
Today the best organizations understand the importance of collaboration. The marketing team needs to meet with research and development to start thinking about how to position upcoming products in the marketplace. Accounting needs to collaborate with facilities managers to anticipate any upcoming capital projects. Your training and development should be built on the foundation of peak performance. You want your associates, executives, and sales teams to be all they can be. But they can’t maximize their potential if you don’t teach them how to manage their stress and wake up energized and alert.
We know an organization is simply people with a purpose. The five major obstacles presented in this chapter prevent people and organizations from achieving and exceeding that purpose. What drives us is the desire to teach people how to be their best selves so they can do great things together. An organization is only as strong and successful as the health of its people. It builds their capacity for optimal performance and overachievement.
Now that we’ve set the table for building capacity, it’s time to start serving up the recipe for better health and performance through enhanced focus, energy, and drive.