Developing High Performance Leadership

This is the third of six articles on our research into High Performance Organization (HPO) best practices. In our first article, we discussed the challenges — from the speed of business to world events — driving the charge toward High Performance Organization (HPO) renewal. In the second article, we looked at two of what we refer to as established 1980s best practices.

Do you remember the last time you worked on a team or in an organization that you considered high performance? 

Most supply chain and business professionals reflect that they only experience this environment a few times throughout a career. You know HPO when you’re in one, because a culture of coordination and results exceeding expectations come by rote. Characteristics our business professionals have ascribed to high performance teams include:

- You achieve excellent results — better than expected
- Everyone on the team contributes to the fullest
- Everyone is empowered to do his/her best
- The team leverages every member’s core strengths
- Everyone works hard and smart
- Team members and leaders enable work to be fun
- The team creates a safe environment to share and build on ideas

These characteristics were fundamental to high performance in the 1980s, when teams were composed mostly of Baby Boomers, and they are even more essential today. The Global Supply Chain Institute’s (GSCI) high performance organization (HPO) research indicates that Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z have an even higher expectation of a holistic, positive organizational culture. As mentioned in the first article in this HPO series, the generational shift in the workforce is a mega trend that benchmark supply chains are embracing, and we detail how HPOs embrace generational differences in a coming article.

How do supply chain organizations create a culture where high performance teams are common? The work starts with High Performance Leadership, our third HPO best practice dating back to the 1980s (see our second article for the first two principles). Supply chain and business leaders must model HPO culture, not only embracing new behaviors like adaptability, emotional intelligence and diplomacy, but also abandoning leadership behaviors that reduce employee engagement, inclusion and empowerment. Leadership must anticipate the resources employees need and make them feel safe to openly discuss mistakes and lessons learned to encourage smart risk-taking and agility.

But leadership alone cannot drive a high-performance culture. Organizations must also establish the principles and best practices to inspire change from the bottom up. Two system HPO best practices that have been connecting employees’ work to business goals since HPO’s creation in the 1980s are:

1. 100% Employee Engagement
2. Accelerating People Development

What does 100% Employee Engagement mean?
Supply chain cultures in the 1980s included long lists of rules, strict supervision, multiple and specific job descriptions and time-based advancement. Early HPO renewals addressing these issues created systems based on teamwork, corporate principles and skill-based advancement. In these days, ‘100% Engagement’ occurred at the individual level in short bursts, with an expectation for high performance on a specific team by creating a cost savings idea or by helping with a safety project.

Today’s benchmark supply chains expect every person in the organization to contribute at his or her highest potential. These organizations make at least one key contribution to business improvement a key component of every employee’s personal development plan. The days of contributing marginally to business improvement as part of a team are gone. Everyone now focuses on continuous personal improvement and improvement within their teams.

How do you Accelerate People Development?
In the initial organizational renewal that created HPO, Accelerating People Development focused on building, operating and maintaining specific skills as well as developing multiple skills across all team members. The talent development focus has shifted dramatically in today’s benchmark companies.

Sustaining exceptional performance necessitates a workforce that can adapt to changes in market requirements and rapid advances in technology. Best-in-class HPOs direct significant effort and resources toward not only attracting the best employees, but also toward continuing to grow and develop them. This training, retraining and upskilling span the breadth of the workforce.

Outstanding people-development systems are characterized by a high level of employee ownership. These companies use robust skill matrices to plan and track progress against business- and employee-driven skill development. When this approach is data-driven, tracked and rewarded, it encourages faster talent development, addresses performance opportunities in an objective and fair fashion and empowers the employee to pursue personal development. These companies believe that continuous learning, spanning one’s entire career, is crucial for personal and company success.

Innovative approaches to training and development support the need for personalized training that’s available on demand. How knowledge is collected, stored and shared is also changing. Digital knowledge-sharing is replacing the previous “tribal knowledge” sharing approaches. Through a digital medium, employees can access training when they want it, 24/7. New technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and remote sensors enable employees to problem-solve and gain exposure to an even broader range of experiences more quickly and in team-based settings. Leading companies also estimate their return on investment from learning initiatives and hold technology and training providers accountable for employee learning levels and skill development.

Accelerating People Development, 100% Employee Engagement, High Performance Leadership, Business Value Creation and a Zero-loss mindset make up the established HPO best practices developed in the 1980s. The next three cultural renewal articles will focus on the “new to the world” HPO best practices: The new principles required to create a competitive advantage for the 2025 speed of business.

About the authors: Mike Burnette is a distinguished fellow at the Global Supply Chain Institute, University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a retired supply chain executive.

Mike Policastro is a researcher at the Global Supply Chain Institute, University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a retired supply chain executive.

About the research: Research conducted by The University of Tennessee Global Supply Chain Institute reinforces the need for supply chain leaders to prioritize renewing “2025” high performance work systems (HPO) as a primary pathway to competitive advantage (Mike Burnette, Mike Policastro, Tim Munyon, “High Performance Organization Best Practices” – white paper University of Tennessee Haslam College of Business, 2019). An explanation of each best practice can be found in the GSCI white paper (Click here to download a free copy [url=https://www.haslam.utk.edu/gsci]https://www.haslam.utk.edu/gsci[/url]).