Organizational Health Quotes

I have yet to meet members of a leadership team who I thought lacked the intelligence or the domain expertise required to be successful. I've met many, however, who failed to foster organizational health. Their companies were riddled with politics, various forms of dysfunction, and general confusion about their direction and mission.

Really great people rarely leave a healthy organization.

Budget issues consume bureaucrats because an adequate budget which is generally defined as an increase over the previous … year, is a reflection of the operational capacity, current health, importance, and future prospects of an organization.

If your employees are not happy, nothing else at your company will go well.

One simple way to keep organizations from becoming cancerous might be to rotate all jobs on a regular, frequent and mandatory basis, including the leadership positions.

Factions are a sign of illness in a party.

Without doubt, there are lots of ways to measure the pulse of a business. But if you have employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow right, you can be sure your company is healthy and on the way to winning.

Organizational health is the single greatest competitive advantage in any business.

The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, experience and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.

Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

If school principals have given up on the important things and are focusing on discipline, they are creating a certain, diluted reality. In an organization that functions properly, discipline should be a marginal issue.

If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left.

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

Early in my career, I sometimes found it difficult to make the tough people decisions - I had to learn that. In business, you want to listen. You want to learn. You want to make sure you're not proceeding without information. But if you wait too long, you can actually hurt an organization even more.

An organization has integrity—is healthy—when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.

I always imagine a good leader is surrounded by people who call their mothers at the end of the day and tell them, 'Mom, you can't believe what I did today. Let me tell you about it.'

If the CEO's behavior is 95 per cent healthy while the rest of the organization is only 50 per cent sound, it is more effective to focus on that crucial and leveraged 5 per cent that makes up the reminder of the CEO's behavior.

A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear.

A well-run organization turns over 10% of their organizations, including senior leadership. I don't have the heart to do that.

A company is an organic, living, breathing thing, not just an income sheet and balance sheet. You have to lead it with that in mind.

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.

To put it another way, I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.

Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.

A company that can't fire people well is like a forest that never has a fire. It becomes overgrown, full of weeds, and it fails.