The Hidden Driver Of Organizational Performance: Conditions For Success

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Dennis Volpe, Executive Performance Coach, Leadership Research Institute. Bridging the Gap Across Strategy, Execution, and Culture.

Over the years, I have participated in a lot of strategic planning sessions with leadership teams of all shapes and sizes. The agenda is usually a little different. The leaders and teams are always different. The challenges may share some similarities across industries, but every organization faces its own unique realities.

Yet I have noticed that many of those conversations eventually arrive at a similar place. Someone eventually asks a version of the same question: “Why are we not performing at the level we believe we should?”

Sometimes the conversation centers on growth. Sometimes it focuses on execution. Sometimes it involves accountability, communication, succession planning or organizational change.

The specifics vary, but the underlying question often feels familiar: “What is holding us back?”

What Happened Next​

What caught my attention was not the question itself. It was what happened next.

The conversation frequently turned toward the team. “Did we have the right leaders?” “Did we have the right team members?” “Did we need more experience, better communication, stronger accountability or additional training?”

Those discussions were reasonable. Talent matters. Leadership matters. Development matters. Yet over time, I found myself becoming curious about something else.

I have worked with organizations that had capable leaders, talented team members and a thoughtful strategy, yet struggled to execute consistently. I have also worked with organizations that had fewer advantages but found a way to maintain momentum, navigate challenges and perform at a high level. The more I observed those differences, the harder it became to explain organizational performance through talent, experience or strategy alone.​

As I reflected on those experiences, I found myself paying less attention to outcomes and more attention to the conditions surrounding them.​

​A Shift In Perspective

The more I observed those patterns, the more I found myself asking a different question during strategic planning and coaching conversations. Instead of asking why performance was falling short, I became interested in the conditions producing individual, team and organizational performance.

That shift changed the conversation.

Rather than focusing exclusively on outcomes, I noticed leadership teams beginning to examine the environment surrounding those outcomes. Instead of asking only how to improve performance, leaders became curious about the factors influencing it: How clearly was direction being communicated? How consistently were priorities understood? Where was confusion creating friction? Where were assumptions replacing clarity?

Those conversations often revealed alignment opportunities that had been hiding in plain sight.

Over time, I came to appreciate that performance is the most observable aspect of organizational life. We can measure it, discuss it, celebrate it and evaluate it. The conditions producing that performance are often less visible. They exist in conversations, expectations, priorities, systems, relationships and daily interactions that many leaders and teams rarely stop to examine.​

That observation changed the way I think about and interact with organizational performance. Today, when I work with a team struggling with execution, communication, accountability or engagement, I still pay attention to the outcomes because we have to. But I find myself more interested in the conditions influencing them.

​Paying More Attention To The Conditions

As I reflect on these experiences, three observations stand out. First, most organizations possess more talent, commitment and capability than they sometimes recognize. Second, performance challenges are often easier to see than the conditions producing them. Third, leaders have more impact on organizational performance than they realize because they create the conditions that influence team performance.

If performance is the result we can observe, what might we discover by paying closer attention to the conditions producing it?

Source: Forbes