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While phrases like “I give you my word” may seem antiquated in a world of contracts and dotted lines, the importance of trust-based relationships has never gone out of style. Isn’t it true that we still long to interact with a boss who is not only understanding, but trustworthy and honest as well? Would you share your personal and career goals with anyone less?

A fresh way of thinking about trust in the workplace is to understand that leaders don’t carry the burden of building trust-based partnerships with members of their workforce alone. The leadership principle of trust is based on a mutual influencing relationship between leaders and individual employees, one that requires a true interdependency of values and vision-sharing.

How can your organization get there? What does it take to build trust-based partnerships between leaders and employees? Here are the primary principles for leaders to follow:

Act with Integrity:

• Model the kind of values that employees can identify with and respect.
• Honor commitments and be counted on.

Demonstrate Caring:

• Take a genuine interest in employees’ backgrounds, interests, and motivations.
• Work toward a win-win solution when problems arise.

Deliver on the Shared Vision:

• Establish shared expectations and determine what success will look like.
• Pave the way for employees by making it possible for them to deliver their very best.

The mark of an effective leader is his or her ability to garner the trust and respect of a workforce. Once trust is established, there must be a focused, continual effort made by both parties to sustain it. This is a critical component of achieving and sustaining high performance.

Learn more about trust-based partnerships and Five Star’s “Leading the High-Performance Workforce” program.

As we move into 2009, the focus on organizational performance has never been higher. Consequently, the ramifications of low performance have never been greater. Organizations around the world are taking a closer look at performance in a large-scale effort to execute strategies that lead to high performance. Fittingly, President-elect Obama recently announced the creation of a Chief Performance Officer (CPO) position, and appointed Nancy Killefer to the role to oversee budget and spending reform in the U.S. government.

The starting point on the path to high performance varies for every organization, yet the journey to get there contains consistent components. In the case of the U.S. government, a multi-faceted strategy has been defined, but a key component is continuous process improvement. Charged with leading this reform, the CPO has been asked by President-elect Obama to “work with economic officials to increase efficiencies and eliminate waste in government spending.”

For many other organizations, the path to high performance might begin with focused and aligned leaders and/or the implementation of enabling technologies, but regardless of the starting point, the key to starting the journey towards high performance is the development of a roadmap. A roadmap defines where the organization is going and each step along the path staying the course towards high performance. It is used as an assessment tool to enable leaders within the organization to track progress and measure success.

A strong roadmap will objectively evaluate the current organization and focus on the critical initiatives needed to improve performance in each of the Five Key Drivers of High Performance™.

Realistic roadmap tips for high performance include:

• Optimize and integrate the Five Key Drivers of High-Performance Organizations across the entire organization.
• Pace implementation; not everything has to happen all at once.
• Plan incremental steps, and measure results along the way.

Has your organization defined a roadmap for high performance?

Leaders desire to build and people want to work in high-performance organizations, because high-performance organizations execute strategy to achieve measurable results. However, research shows that only 15% of organizations can be classified as high performance.  Yet, the good news is that all organizations have the potential for high performance. The question is, how can that potential be realized?

So, what is the relationship between strategy execution and high performance? The optimization and integration of each of the Five Key Drivers of High Performance™ is essential to achieving and sustaining high-performance organization that execute strategy. As leaders and workforces embark on the journey of creating a high-performance organization, a strategy to optimize and integrate each of the Five Key Drivers must be in place. This strategy must define the long-term direction, priorities, and goals of an organization. During the process of defining the strategy, leaders must evaluate their organizational move through the lens of the Five Key Drivers, which provides the framework for enabling organizations to execute against their business strategy.

Successful execution of a well-defined business strategy, one that is framed around the optimization and integration of the Five Key Drivers, leads to high performance.

Is your organization executing the kind of strategy that leads to high performance?

Integration infers a necessary connection and joining relationship between two or more elements. This definition presumes that these two or more elements, when integrated, function better and are more valuable than any single element alone.

While it is imperative that each of the Five Key Drivers of High Performance™ be optimized for maximum performance value, it is also important that a move to transform any organization be grounded in a strategy that both optimizes and integrates these drivers. Integration enables organizations to multiply the impact of their transformational efforts and create high-performance organizations that execute critical strategy.

Let’s look at an example. Image an organization that has defined a strategy to implement ERP software. Most organizations and their leaders would not dispute the value of creating training programs to build the knowledge and skills of the workforce that will use this software. However, what would happen if key leadership was not focused and aligned around this strategy, or if the organization was designing the software around broken work processes? Sound familiar? Hopefully not. Yet this scenario is frequently encountered by organizations, and it illustrates the need to optimize and integrate the Five Key Drivers across all strategic efforts.  In order to achieve the desired results for any strategy, each of the Five Key Drivers must be individually optimized and cross-functionally integrated.

Is your organization integrating the Five Key Drivers of High Performance across all your strategic efforts?

If you research the word optimize on dictionary.com, you find the following definitions:

1. To make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible.
2. To maximize efficiency and speed in retrieval, storage, or execution.

After reading these definitions several things stand out.

1. The definitions presume that something already exists, but is not operating at its fullest potential.
2. Each definition centers on taking action to achieve the fullest potential.

The Five Key Drivers of High Performance are grounded in these assumptions and the belief that all organizations possess three basic elements: People, Process, and Technology. However, a critical difference between low- and high-performance organizations lies in their ability to not just possess these elements, but rather to make them as “effective, perfect, and useful as possible.”

Simply stated, high-performance organizations focus on the hows, not just the whats.

High-performance organizations gain a competitive advantage and deliver results because they optimize their performance in each of the Five Key Drivers:

• People
  • Focused and Aligned Leaders
  • Skilled and Motivated Workforce
• Process
  • Integrated Talent Management System
  • Continuous Improvement
• Technology
  • Enabling Technology

Is your organization optimizing its performance?