Inside the Talent Studio

Susan Lucia Annunzio and Pamela Stroko recently had a wide-ranging conversation about high-performance organizations. Below is an edited version of the highlights. To view the entire conversation, please click the Taleo image.

Pamela Stroko: Let's talk about the research that gave birth to your book (Contagious Success). Seventy-seven percent of the global knowledge workers in the study thought they were part of high-performing workgroups, but only 10 percent were able to prove it.

Susan Lucia Annunzio: Looking at it in another way, we had over 3,000 participants, the highest paid, best educated people from the top companies in the world and 90 percent were not part of groups that consistently made money and drove innovation for their company.

We believe productivity plus creativity equals high performance. If you want a return on your investment in human capital, you have to get a return on brainpower. Yet many companies have a sign up that says, "Check your brain at the door." People get punished for thinking, for challenging the status quo.

PS: One negative behavior you mention in your book is the "meeting after the meeting," which always seems more interesting than the meeting itself.

SLA: That's because at the meeting after the meeting, people tell the truth. People are afraid to speak the truth in the real meeting. I recommend starting meetings by speaking the unspeakables. By bringing the hallway conversation into the room, people can talk about the real problems and begin to tackle them."

PS: What do high-performing organizations have in common?

SLA: The number one differentiator of high performance around the world is that people feel valued. They say, "My boss tells me what to do, not how to do it." "My boss cares about what I think."

PS: If you have a negative culture, how do you begin to change it?

SLA: Companies spend so much time and money trying to bring talent into the organization, yet we spend very little time looking at the environment those people are going into. If you want a return on your investment, you have to foster an environment where people are allowed to think. The less able they are to think, the lower the likelihood that they're going to stay long term.

PS: What can our audience begin doing tomorrow to set them on the path to high performance?

SLA: My first piece of advice would be to start at the top. Whether you're part of the C-suite or part of a team that runs a functional group or business unit, your organization can't be higher performing than the team that runs it. It's important to ask, "Is our team high performing?" and "Is our behavior spreading health or disease throughout the organization?"