The Five Leading Indicators of Business Success

At Healthy Companies International, we have identified five leading indicators for business success based on hundreds of CEO interviews over two decades. They are:

• Purpose and Values
• Productive Relationships
• Shared Direction
• Creativity and Innovation
• Performance Excellence

Each indicator specifies a crucial strength your organization needs to produce superior business results. And each one offers you clear opportunities to do something today that will improve your results over time.

Together these leading indicators take the mystery out of building a JEA organization. Let’s look at how JEA leaders and teams generate high marks on all five of them.

• A JEA organization stays on purpose and lives its values.

When you have an open heart and invite passion around the values of your organization, you construct a foundation that can withstand any storm. You define what your company stands for. This gives people purpose and inspires them to do their best. When these values live inside the hearts and minds of every employee, they guide business decisions and drive every system and process inside your organization. Your people become ambassadors of your business.

Your organization is living its values when people act courageously to maintain high ethical standards. Communication is open and decisions are transparent. Every person’s contribution is respected. Doing the right thing is as important as doing things right. And emotional honesty, empathy and compassion, and emotional resilience are the name of the game.

• A JEA organization mobilizes productive relationships.

If you’re a JEA leader, your confident humility creates two-way trust with your employees. You are authentic, dependable, and consistent. You build solid relationships and teams. You encourage honest dialogue and healthy debate. You emphasize teaching and learning, and develop strong leaders. And you let everyone know that it’s their responsibility to shed light on the people around them.

You know your organization is mobilizing people and building productive relationships when people are both trusting and trustworthy. Collaboration is the norm. Leaders at all levels share power, authority, and decision-making. People value each other and embrace diversity. They effectively convert conflicts into creative opportunities because they believe “we are all in this together.”

• A JEA organization creates shared direction.

As a JEA leader, you use realism and optimism to create focus for people. You know that shared direction is the glue that holds your organization together. So you tell the truth about the present and paint a vivid picture of the future. You make sure your vision is shared at every level. You create a strategy that is winning and actionable. You set goals that are focused and aligned. This enables your organization to move forward like a well-coordinated armada of ships sailing the Mediterranean during the height of the Greek empire.

You have created shared direction when everyone in your organization understands where you are and where you’re going. And they know why and how. Their individual and team goals are in sync with your company’s strategic ones. Their performance standards and plans also match. People at all levels know how their jobs fit into the bigger picture.

• A JEA organization unleashes and harnesses creativity and innovation.

When you have an open mind, you embrace learning, for yourself and others. This opens the door to the creativity and innovation you need to keep up with a changing business environment. There are many ways to grow. You might change the way you make money, add value to your products and services, or redesign your offerings. You might invest in research, create new experiences for your customers, or rebrand your business. Or you might join forces with others through new networks, alliances, and distribution channels. However you do it, you are adept at unleashing the creative energies of your people to build and sustain a winning company.

You know you have a culture of creativity and innovation when learning is everyone’s top priority. People seek to understand themselves and how the business works. They routinely question assumptions. In fact, they question everything. Learning from each other, and from mistakes, is how your organization improves performance. By not clinging to old ways of doing things, people at all levels freely create the future.

• A JEA organization achieves performance excellence.

Your constructive impatience as a JEA leader is what produces results. It’s all about finding the right level of anxiety to maximize performance. You are driven by your abiding passion for winning. Your aspirations are bold, your expectations clear. You manage costs to maximize value. You push decisions down to the right people at the right level. You let people know where they stand through ongoing feedback. And you make it safe for everyone to be their best selves.

You have achieved performance excellence when accountability is clear and metrics mean something. Results consistently exceed expectations. People feel safe and protected as well as motivated to outperform. They channel their anxiety into productive energy. Your organization is fast, flexible, and responsive to change.

Putting It All Together

JEA organizations get high marks in all five leading indicators. Their people live the values, build productive relationships, share direction, are creative, and achieve performance excellence. People are the engine that drives business. And just enough anxiety is the fuel that fires up that engine and creates speed and success.

Being a JEA leader is about making the most of the energy inside your organization. Just as you might rev your car engine to keep it from stalling, or downshift to negotiate a sharp curve, you need to modulate the engine inside your organization. You need to monitor and manage people’s energy—creating just enough for peak performance. It’s your job, as the steward of your organization.

Yet building a JEA organization is everybody’s job. In fact, we must all be the JEA leaders in our own lives—whether we are CEOs or factory workers, division heads or team leaders, stay-at-home parents or global leaders. As we develop the five qualities of a JEA leader, we are more able to embrace change, bounce back from adversity, tackle problems, seize opportunities, and feel positive about who we are and where we’re going.

Change happens one person at a time. By becoming a JEA leader, you will set the standard for your life and your leadership. You will help others become JEA leaders and build JEA teams. And, together, you will create a JEA organization.

Ask yourself…

• Are we a JEA organization?
• For which leading indicators does my organization have high marks?
• Which leading indicators require more time, attention, and energy?

Without just enough anxiety, your organization will sooner or later teeter on the brink of decline. On the human side, you will see increasingly ineffective leadership, the loss of good people, underperformance in critical arenas, slowed innovation, and an inability to change. In operations, you will notice excessive costs, poor product quality, inefficient processes, slower and slower speed to market, and low service delivery. In the marketplace, you will discover lagging growth, declining market share, growing competitive pressure, withering brand value, and poor customer feedback. And on the financial side, you will witness declining stock price, falling return on capital, low analyst ratings, and lower margins.

When you lead with just enough anxiety, however, you will experience an entirely different outcome. You will have a capable and committed workforce, a well-executed vision and strategy, operational excellence, a world-class reputation, and a strong capacity for change and reinvention. You will enjoy profitable growth and long-term value creation.

Just enough anxiety is what you need to drive positive change. It is the fuel that stimulates growth. It is the productive energy that solves problems and averts crises. Just enough anxiety is the hidden driver of business success—inside you and your organization—so contact us at Healthy Companies International if you’d like more information on how to use just enough anxiety to leverage your business performance and success.

Healthy Companies International
2101 Wilson Boulevard
Suite 1002
Arlington, VA 22201 USA
01.703.351.9901
www.healthycompanies.com