Seize Opportunities

Contagious Success: Spreading High Performance Throughout Your Organization
by Susan Annunzio

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The third gene identified in high-performing workgroups is the ability to seize opportunities. This requires a learning environment in which people can take risks, generate new ideas, and make mistakes. That, in turn, leads to new products, services, and markets.

The marketing group at UNITE, a U.K. based owner and manager of student housing, saw an opportunity to generate new revenue after conducting customer research that identified the need for high-speed broadband Internet access for residents. The group jumped on the idea and entered into a partnership with a telecom supplier to provide the new service. The company expects to generate more than £2 million in sales revenue in the first year of the agreement. "It's considered to be a great business opportunity," noted Rachel Bateson, marketing manager at UNITE.

GreenHouse Communications, a fifteen-year-old marketing communication firm, encourages continual learning. "The reason our company is still going when many agencies like ours have folded is pathological tenacity. Whether it's overcoming marketplace challenges or challenges our clients face, we don't give up until we've found a way to make it work," said Sandy House, chairman and CEO.

A learning environment can foster unexpected positive results. For example, Pfizer reaped $1.7 billion in sales from Viagra in 2002, which got its start as a potential treatment for a heart condition. As BusinessWeek reported in a 1998 cover story, "The New Era of Lifestyle Drugs," "Ironically, the drug now at the forefront of all this ferment was discovered more by serendipity than fancy chemistry. Pfizer researchers were investigating the compound, technically known as sildenafil citrate, for angina in men when they heard that study participants reported an unexpected side effect: the drug was improving their sex lives." Instead of concluding that their work on angina was a failure, they seized a new opportunity.

Bright Horizons Family Solutions, Inc., a workplace child-care center business headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, turned a serious challenge into an opportunity during the 1990s. "Unemployment dropped and we had a terrible problem hiring enough teachers. Child care was so undervalued, people could make more money in any other profession," explained company cofounder and chairman Linda Mason.

As a result, many child-care businesses were forced to fold. However, Bright Horizons used the shortage of workers as an opportunity to become more sophisticated and creative in its recruiting strategies. Up until that time, the company primarily recruited early childhood majors on college campuses. "We began to actively target seniors and empty nesters," said Mason. "We also targeted immigrants.... There are lots of immigrants who are highly educated, but have limited job options. That's when we developed our own internal training and accreditation program. Our recruiting function has become more sophisticated, broad, and creative," Mason said.

Valuing people, optimizing critical thinking, and seizing opportunities enable high performance. Our study also found that the single biggest impediment to high performance around the world is short-term thinking. To meet quarterly financial goals, companies are trying to do more with less, overworking their people, and cutting muscle along with the fat. Regrettably, they may be sacrificing long-term sustainability for short-term results.

The study identified groups that were once high performing but no longer are. These groups may have once gotten strong financial results by understanding the business and meeting customer needs, but they were unable to sustain these results because they didn't create the right environment. On the other hand, there are workgroups that create the right environment but haven't made the numbers. The key to sustainability is to get results the right way. The more workgroups that get results the right way, the better your company's performance.

In the chapters ahead, I will detail the findings of the largest-ever global study of knowledge workers. You'll learn how to build a work environment that drives high performance, what you can do to improve the performance of your best workgroups, how to "move the middle," and what turns high-performing workgroups into "used-to-be's."

In today's world of increasing demands and unprecedented pressure, business leaders naturally go back to their comfort zone - doing what they have always done, but doing it harder and faster. I think there is a different way. As Jim Collins wrote in his best-selling book, Good to Great, "I offer everything herein for your thoughtful consideration, not blind acceptance. You're the judge and jury." As part of your deliberations, I ask you to think about whether you would lead and manage differently if you had proof that the following statements were true:

• There is a quantifiable correlation between profitable growth and the respectful treatment of employees.

• Focusing on productivity alone decreases performance.

• Hard work and high expectations only pay off when people feel valued.

• Strategic planning produces the highest financial return when people are encouraged to take risks.

• Creating a process for high-performing workgroups to share their secrets can increase the number of such groups.

The remainder of this book provides the proof. The rest is up to you.

Key Points

• Every company has high-performing workgroups that make money for the business and develop new products, services, or markets. If you spread the secrets of these groups, you can improve the overall performance of your company.

• To increase performance, companies need to focus on the single factor that is most critical to high performance - the environment of their workgroups.

• To succeed, companies need to know their business and their customers well - but that alone won't produce high performance.

Unexpected Findings

• Only 10 percent of global knowledge workers, the highest paid and best educated workers in the world, could provide evidence that their workgroup was high performing.

• We found a global standard - three characteristics that consistently distinguish high-performing workgroups around the world. They are: valuing people, optimizing critical thinking, and seizing opportunities.

• The single biggest impediment to high performance is short-term focus.

Copyright © 2004 Susan Annunzio. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Susan Lucia Annunzio is chairman and CEO of the Hudson Highland Center for High Performance, a subsidiary of Hudson Highland Group, Inc. The author of Evolutionary Leadership and coauthor of Communicoding, she advises senior executives around the world and is an adjunct professor of management at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.