Moving to Excellent

Congratulations on building a high-performing organization! You’re already excelling in so many areas, and now it’s time to focus on sustaining success and driving innovation. At this stage, the goal is to fine-tune your strategies and push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Leadership Effectiveness

You are very confident in this area. It is likely your leadership structure and team is strong, and that you are willing to make conscious and sometimes hard decisions to keep it that way. You have practices in place to address issues that come up (conflicts, for instance) to ensure that they don’t fester into bigger organizational challenges.

Now you want to focus on ensuring your organizational culture matches with how effective your leadership practices are. Do your team members feel empowered, and know their own scopes of control? Do you have practices for mentorship and support for strong performers, and potentially a path to more responsibility or leadership themselves? How are you building a culture that values transparency, continuous learning, and strategic thinking.

Finally, put some thought into your long term success, including transition thinking. Even if your leaders aren’t thinking about moving on, planning out over the medium and long term future can identify what individual goals and expectations are for your leaders. Transition planning is a way to future-proof your organization, thinking about how the organization might run when you change out some of the key leaders, which is one way to plan for unexpected changes. And if there is a transition thought out for the medium term, it is very important to put conscious thought into place for how to make that work for the organization (either collaboratively if it is something that can be shared, or by the individual if it is not).

Practices

Your organization is running very well – now let’s focus here is on keeping your people supported and engaged.

Over the last few years, hybrid and remote work have been the norm. Improving your practices here will increase your overall employee satisfaction (and productivity). Be explicit about what your practices are, and invite feedback and collaboration on what they can be. This may mean you want to look at unorthodox practices like a four day work week.

Keep your organizational structure (org chart, departments, processes) lean and thoughtful so that you can quickly change and adapt to the changes in our industry. You’ve put in strong change management processes, which can help manage these changes. Continue to break down silos and foster that collaboration.

Lean into the tools of performance-driven change to keep the organization moving forward. For instance, LAist leaned into the tools and practices introduced into our industry through the Media Transformation Challenge and Table Stakes to power their DEI task force. These tools truly engage employees where they are and provide important frameworks for actually driving change.

Finally, focus on building a culture that focuses on transparency, continuous learning, and strategic thinking. Ensure that every individual is empowered to do what they need to do and is protected in doing so. Reward thoughtful failure to encourage learning and innovation.

People and Culture

Document and share your collaboration successes both within and outside your organization to establish thought leadership. Elevate delegation practices by coaching your leadership team to empower their teams further. Customize wellness initiatives for your team, offering flexible schedules, mental health support, and continuous feedback loops to refine your programs. Foster an innovative culture where experimentation and thoughtful risk-taking are encouraged and rewarded.