Improving Organisational Performance and Eliminating the Silo Mentality

Value Leverage is a structured approach that is capable of rapidly improving the overall performance of an organisation. It achieves this by changing people’s perception of their job. In many organisations, people often only focus on carrying out their own activities or processes. Value Leverage ensures that everyone, at every level, is focused on improving the outcomes that they are creating, in a way that has a direct effect on the success of the organisation.

Why does perception affect performance?

Consider the situation of two cleaners in two separate hospitals. Imagine asking each of them to describe their job. One cleaner explains “I am a hospital cleaner. I spend all of my time cleaning. I clean everything from the hospital toilets, operating theatres, kitchens and wards.” The other cleaner describes their job in slightly different terms. “I am a hospital cleaner. I work with my colleagues to try to eradicate infectious bacteria in the hospital, so that our patients can recover in the shortest possible time. Although the vast majority of our time is spent cleaning, we spend two hours each month finding out from the microbiologists where infectious bacteria has been found. We then develop better methods of improving our bacteria control”.

If you had to go into hospital for an operation, which hospital would you prefer? If the different approaches described by the cleaners were symptomatic of each hospital’s approach, which hospital would you estimate would have the highest overall performance? Yet the difference between what is happening in the two hospitals is actually relatively small. The only difference is that, in one hospital, the cleaners are only focusing on the cleaning activity itself. In the other hospital, rather than just cleaning, the cleaners are also spending a small percentage of their time reviewing the critical outcomes of their activities and planning how to improve the consequences on other groups,

How easy is it to improve overall performance?

In principle, this would suggest that regularly utilising a small amount of time in this way could substantially improve the overall performance of an organisation. However, it intuitively seems unlikely that just giving cleaners a monthly training session on bacteria control would achieve such a dramatic change in culture.

Without understanding the psychological conditions that could ensure a successful outcome to such sessions, it is likely that potentially productive time would be wasted in unproductive meetings. This would only lead to a decrease in the overall effectiveness of the organisation. In order to be effective, such sessions would need to be able to change people’s perception of their job. Their perception would need to change from just carrying out activities (e.g. cleaning) to creating outcomes (e.g. reducing occurrence of bacteria) that directly impacted on the success or failure of the organisation to achieve its mission (e.g. to return patients to heath). This principle is equally true from the most junior staff of an organisation to the most senior management team.

Value Leverage is a structured approach that enables this type of transformation to be achieved. Although it is a very practical approach, it is based on proven principles derived from a number a disciplines including Psychology, Systems Thinking and Complexity. It gives managers, from Chief Executives to front line supervisors, the ability to utilise a small percentage of their team’s time in a way that will “leverage” the value being created by the majority of the team’s time. Using the Value Leverage approach, it is possible to ensure the whole organisation is continually monitoring and improving the outcomes that are critical to improving the success of the organisation. In a nutshell, Value Leverage is a way of allowing everyone to work much, much smarter, rather than just harder.

How does Value Leverage work?

In order to understand how this approach works, it is helpful to first consider the matrix which describes how we spend our time between urgent activities and those that are genuinely adding value to the success of the organisation.

For example, when we are correcting problems that have been created by things not being completed right-first-time, we are carrying out urgent activity that is not creating any additional value (bottom left quadrant). So when hospital staff are treating patients who are sick, because they have picked up an infection in the hospital, the activity is clearly urgent but is not adding value. The overall process would have been far more successful if the level of cleanliness had been such that the patient had not caught the infection in the first place.

However, if the hospital only focuses on local optimisation, it may appear that it is more efficient to reduce costs by not spending time ensuring that the cleaners were directly involved in bacteria control. In theory, the costs of cleaning would be reduced, freeing up resources for more valuable activity. In practice, the consequential cost of such a change could far outweigh the short term benefits.

This may seem obvious. Yet, this type of problem is continually happening in the vast majority of organisations. This is because the complexity of most organisations makes it very difficult for managers to optimise the contribution of the individual parts of the organisation in a way that will ensure the highest overall performance.

How can such a complex problem be resolved?

The Value Leverage approach simplifies the complexity. It gives managers and staff throughout the organisation the ability to ensure that their local activities are creating the desired consequences for the organisation as a whole. Using Value Leverage, the improvement in performance of individual departments or teams, is not just monitored by local criteria (e.g. cost of cleaning). It is monitored by the improvement in critical outcomes (e.g. change in the levels of anti-biotic resistant bacteria found on door handles or in operating theatres) and subsequent consequences (e.g. increase or decrease in patients with infections). In other words, the overall performance of the organisation can be increased when the cleaning department is continually improving the choreography between itself, other health professionals and the patients. Value Leverage is a way of ensuring this happens.

Focusing on improving the choreography of the various parts, rather than just attempting to optimise aspects of local performance, is equally powerful at all levels of the organisation. In order to achieve this, a change of emphasis is needed in the Value Leverage Matrix. Organisational Performance will improve when less time is spent in the bottom, left-hand “Urgent, but not adding value” segment, and more time spent in the top “Adding value” row.

			Urgent Not Urgent

Thus, overall performance is improved by understanding the trade-off between different time segments. Spending time ensuring that the cleaners are skilled and motivated to improve bacteria control would be time in the top right quadrant (Not urgent, but indirectly adding value). If a relatively small amount of time spent in this part of the matrix, drastically reduces time spent by a different department in the bottom left quadrant, then overall performance is improved.

Value Leverage does much more than provide the techniques to identify and monitor these relationships. It assists in creating the psychological conditions that will enable the whole organisation to focus on improving those relationships and naturally achieve greater organisational success.

If you would like more information on the Value Leverage approach to improving performance and creating High Performance Teams that work across functional divides, please click on the link below.

Improving Organisational Performance in the Public and Private Sectors