What needs to be true for people to do their best work

At Humankind, we believe people are the biggest lever for business performance. Technology can enable disruption, but it's people who drive it. Whether a business is focused on growth, profitability, entering new markets or delivering for customers, it's ultimately its people who make it happen.

Yet when businesses think about improving performance, the focus often goes to strategy, technology, processes or finding the right talent. All of these play an important role, but so does how an organisation supports its people to perform.

As businesses grow, this becomes increasingly apparent. What worked with 15 people can start to create challenges at 50 or 100. Decisions that once happened quickly take longer, responsibilities become less clear, the connection to the organsation’s mission and culture can begin to weaken, and founders or senior leaders find themselves increasingly involved in day-to-day decisions.

It's easy to see these as individual capability or accountability challenges, when often there's something broader going on in how the organisation operates.

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What makes a high-performing organisation?

We believe high-performing organisations are built by creating the right environment for people to do their best work.

Our Organisational Performance Model brings together four interconnected areas that help leaders understand what's working well, what's getting in the way and where to focus their efforts.

Align your team to the future

Creating clarity about where the business is heading, what matters most, why it matters, and how people's work contributes to achieving its goals.

Cultivate leadership strength

Developing leaders who can translate strategy, set clear expectations, build capability, and empower their teams to take ownership.

Shape your organisation

Ensuring structures, roles and accountabilities support business priorities, with clear responsibilities and decision-making at the right level.

Embed better ways of working

Establishing practical systems and habits that help teams work effectively together, keep core cultural tenets alive, cascade key information,and deliver results.

These areas are closely connected. A business might invest in leadership development, for example, but if leaders lack the authority to make decisions or their teams are working towards competing priorities, that investment will only go so far.

Looking at the organisation as a whole helps leaders understand where changes could make the greatest difference to how their people and teams perform.

A good starting point is to look at where work gets stuck in your business. Are decisions consistently coming back to the CEO? Are teams clear on what they're accountable for? Are your leaders spending their time leading, or getting caught up in day-to-day delivery? The answers can tell you a lot about where the organisation needs to evolve.

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Building a business that performs beyond the CEO

We see this regularly in growing businesses.

In the early stages, the CEO is often across everything. They're close to customers, people and decisions, and that involvement can be an important part of the business's success.

As the organisation grows, more ownership needs to sit across the leadership team. This requires the leadership team operating as a first team, clearer responsibilities, stronger leadership capability, and the confidence for others to make decisions.

It's something we've thought about within Humankind too.

In my article, Building something bigger than ourselves, I reflect on my own experience of developing our leadership team and creating the environment for others to step up.

My job as CEO isn’t to make myself indispensable. It’s to build the team, develop leaders and create a whole system that is bigger than any one of us.

This thinking is central to how we approach organisational performance. As businesses grow, their people, leadership and ways of working need to evolve alongside them.

Through our Performance Partnerships, we work alongside CEOs and leadership teams as their fractional Head of People & Culture. We go beyond day-to-day people support to help leaders build an interconnected system where leadership, culture, structure and ways of working come together to drive performance.