Colonel Joshua Chamberlin, an 1863 British soldier demonstrated the power of living a life of purpose. Discovering your life’s purpose stimulates volition, urging you to perform at a higher level. Performance rather than success should be the goal because success is subjective while performance is objective. When you find this purpose, you also gain the desire to live with sincerity and pursue life goals and objectives that make a difference in your life and the lives of the others.
High-performing organizations know their fundamental purpose, their mission, and pursue it with a great sense of urgency. The same adage is true for high performing individuals. A clear life purpose enables you to choose the most effective response for any situation without making compromises that will derail your performance.
John Kenagy, M.D., is a physician, former visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and author of Designed to Adapt: Leading Healthcare in Challenging Times. Kenagy identifies the keys to leadership success in getting people to act their way to a new way of thinking:
First, set a clear, simple and meaningful direction – the vision and compelling “why.”
Second, develop and empower people; it is your people, not technology and process that make the real difference to performance.
Third, build trust and optimism through positive results in problem solving the needs of patients.
Fourth, solve those problems as real-time experience, close to the work, not in meetings.
And finally, fifth, grow by repeating your success and relentlessly challenging the status quo.
The results are always positive. For example, in one year, staff on a Midwestern hospital medical-surgical nursing unit changed their behaviour to generate the greatest increase in patient satisfaction in a 17-hospital system, while simultaneously increasing productivity 14 percent, decreasing length of stay 8 percent, and generating $1.7 million in new revenue and savings.
Changing behaviours is a lot harder than most realize, even if not doing so means lost business, bankruptcy, the demise of a company, or harming patients. Focusing on the aspect of belief and behaviour over technology and process is working for leaders and their organizations that are adopting the skill of Positive Presence as a high-priority business strategy and performance improvement initiative. Dr. Deming may have said it best this way, summing up with an urgency imperative, “You do not have to change. You do not have to survive either.”
CORPORATE HARMONY is grateful to Dr. Michael E. Frisina for his contributions to this entry.
Catherine is the President and CEO of CORPORATE HARMONY, providing virtual solutions for leadership development and organizational culture change. Her leadership and coaching experience as a Project Manager in an ever-changing, fast moving technological organization with unrelenting demands drove her to the realization that a positive mindset and strength-building behaviors are essential for today’s complex and chaotic organizational systems. CORPORATE HARMONY’s virtual platform of programs, coaching and performance measurement, is an innovative online technology of tested proprietary content. The world-class content of CORPORATE HARMONY’s Positive Presence Program develops the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and the necessary ‘Positive Presence Behaviour Competencies’ for maintaining a positive and energized mindset and increased performance in today’s complex work environment, and leading to a culture of collaboration and connection. Catherine’s vision for Corporate Harmony is to bring the skill of “Positive Presence” to the corporate world as it becomes more complex, ambiguous and chaotic. Catherine is uniquely positioned to impact organizations’ productivity and long term success, with her powerful vision of eliminating bad stress from every workplace around the globe, bringing purpose into the people equation to promote healthy, productive and meaningful work cultures and turn the tide on the neglect of mental health on a global scale. Catherine is author of the book: “CORPORATE HARMONY – The Performance Link for Today’s Modern Organization” Catherine can be reached at: Catherine.Osborne@corporateharmony.ca or go to ‘contact us’ on our website www.corporateharmony.ca. Catherine is available for consultation, and can be reached by 519-695-3407.