What does success look like in a big corporate organisation? Is it a high level of Employee Engagement? Is it positive sales and revenue growth year on year? Is it underlying Net Profit? Is it growth in market share? Or is it all of these? Having spent over 20 years in big corporate environments, I have noticed that success can be all of these, and yet it can be any of them – depending on the message that the organisation is looking to deliver to the market and to their shareholders. And the interesting thing about the messaging is that if it seems to change year after year, what message does it send to the real ‘assets’ of the organisation – the employees, and how do they then act and operate in the environment? Is there consistency? Are the results replicable, predictable and sustainable?

I have seen this play out over the last 5 years in a very large corporate organisation, and it has been intriguing to witness – even more intriguing as I have continued to learn more around leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and what distinguishes a good solid company from a great company. Global leadership expert John C Maxwell believes that leadership rises and falls on influence, and when we look at a leader’s ability to influence in a large corporate environment, combined with the level of Emotional Intelligence of the leader, we can gain an insight into the health and vibrancy of the organisation. And when we add the additional layer of ESIP from Meta Dynamics, we can quickly see the underlying patterns emerge that either underpins the organisation’s strong, sustainable performance, or severely hampers the performance, and holds the organisation back.

From an Environmental (E) perspective, the Emotionally Intelligent leader understands the critical importance of establishing, developing and maintaining a culture that is aligned to a common purpose and that operates at a standard of excellence which is not only non-negotiable, but is also sustainable. They possess a level of self awareness that enables them to tap into their emotions and channel these emotions in the most productive way, they are able to easily empathise with others on their team, they can build strong and genuine relationships with others, they influence and inspire others through their example, their words and their deeds and they can set the direction and vision of the organisation guided by a strong personal philosophy, underpinned by genuine authenticity. When the leader has been able to facilitate the creation of this type of environment, it significantly reduces the possibility of people within the organisation being distracted by ‘shiny thing syndrome’, as they are aligned to a common vision, they understand the standards required to deliver on the vision, and they are better able to overcome any obstacles that are placed in their way. They do not change direction every 5 minutes when a new ‘shiny thing’ appears. An example of this took place 8 years ago when I was running a corporate sales team, and our organisation’s sales performance was tracking significantly behind target. The logical and easy approach was for the Sales Director to be distracted and demand all attention be placed on increasing the sales performance in the short term, to the exclusion of everything else (‘shiny thing’). This would have resulted in short term uplift in performance and results, but at what cost? Instead, the Sales Director gathered his senior leadership team together and revisited and reviewed all the key elements of the environment to identify what was missing, and where we needed to regroup and reload. We relooked at our vision, our values, the standards of excellence that we had agreed to but were not operating to consistently enough, we looked at the expectations we had of key stakeholders and partners, we reviewed our own beliefs and attitudes, and finally re evaluated and re set our goals for the next 6 months. The result? Within 6 months, we had turned around the sales performance of the organisation, ending the year with the best sales results in 5 years, and the engagement of our employees also hit an all time high. So with hindsight, I now have a much clearer understanding of the absolute necessity to create an environment that is set up for sustainable success, and the tenacity that is required to fight to uphold the standards within the environment, despite the many possible distractions that appear to knock the team off track.

And only once the environment has been created, can the organisation then look to the Structure (S) that is required in order to support the environment. Many organisations look at themselves as being very strategic, when in actual fact, they are purely tactical and default immediately to the task of what needs to be done, without giving any (or much) thought to the environment or the structure that is required – whilst this can sometimes deliver results to the organisation, often the results are ‘hit and miss’, the performance of individuals within the organisation can be across a very wide spectrum, people will be ‘very busy’, but not necessarily productive in delivering the outcomes that the organisation is looking for. So from a structural point of view, the successful organisation will be very prescriptive on the benchmarks, key performance indicators (kpi’s), goals & objectives, methods of operation, processes etc that are required to deliver the outcomes that meet the organisations vision. So whilst the people within the organisation may still be ‘busy’, they are busy with a clear intent, with a clear objective, and hence they become more productive. A recent example of the importance of structure occurred when I was asked to manage a national group of Project Managers – in reviewing the structure they had in place, I recognised that each Project Manager had approximately 20 separate kpi’s that they were measured against, with many of the kpi’s not directly supporting the environment that had been created. As a result, we had many Project Managers arguing and justifying why they were unable to take on new projects, that they were operating at maximum capacity, that they were extremely ‘busy’ – the end result being that customers with new services to be connected were suffering extended delays, which then flowed on to them being dissatisfied in the performance of the organisation. Through reducing the number of kpi’s that each Project Manager carried, it allowed a different conversation to take place, all of a sudden the justification of being at capacity was no longer valid, Project Managers were able to take on more projects, the delays in customers getting services connected reduced significantly, and most importantly, the structure of the team linked more congruently with the environment, and predictably, the level of customer satisfaction increased. One of the key learnings for me was the importance of having the structure clearly defined, and clearly articulated, ensuring that the elements and categories within the structure (kpi’s benchmarks, processes etc) congruently supported and underpinned the environment.

The power of clearly establishing an environment aligned around a common purpose, vision and values and then establishing a strong structure within the environment cannot be underestimated. Through understanding this model, it becomes much easier to assess organisations on their performance and direction, and then be able to assist them in their development and transformation. Many organisations focus their attention entirely on the Implementation (I) and their People (P), thinking that if they are able to get their people (sometimes encourage them!) to do more, they will achieve the results. When the results do not materialise to their expectations, the leaders of the organisation seek to then replace the people or train/up skill their people, thinking that if they focus on the people and the doing, success will be inevitable. This pattern will inevitably deliver a predictable result, that is, a level of success and performance that is not sustainable, replicable or consistent. The Emotionally Intelligent leader though, fully understands that the power of the people and what they do only pays consistent and sustainable dividends when the environment is created for sustainable success, and is ably supported by the structure. So, as Executive Coaches and Leaders of business and communities, there is a massive opportunity to assist companies and organisations to transform their business, to create or re-create environments that will enable success to be predictable, to enable these organisations to attract the people into the organisation that will rally around the vision, mission and values, to assist them in establishing a structure that will support the environment, and know that the people they do attract will implement what needs to be done in order to create a profitable and sustainable organisation.

The ESIP model in beautiful action!!