Languages undergo an evolutionary process where renewal takes place by accepting newly minted words (Sarah Palin's famous refudiate being one of them). Languages also evolve when every once in a while a new phrase is thrown up, that soon gains enormous popularity and, pretty soon, through over-usage, becomes a cliche. What is interesting is that in many such cases the new word is just a more important sounding version of a word that has been around for a long while. High Performance Organisation is one such word. In its earlier, humbler avatar HPO was called an efficient organisation.

HPO is the golden, aspirational goal that every organisation aspires to. This is a very laudable goal as the prime purpose of corporate organisations is to create great economic returns for all its constituents (please note I have avoided the word stakeholders, since it has been become a cliche!).

However it will be good to play the devil's advocate and ask the question: Can becoming an HPO be an end in itself? I would submit that it is clearly a desirable outcome but one that needs to be accompanied and balanced by certain other outcomes.

One such balancing outcome would be the recognition and nurturing of High Performance Individuals (HPIs, in short). If we postulate that the two most important resources that any organisation deploys are people and financial resources, then one would expect enough focus on both these elements when they report their results. Most often, company reports focus predominantly on growth in numbers. In a few companies, an attempt is made to assign a value to its people resources. In the main, only fleeting references are made to acknowledge people resources.

Before any reporting on people performance parameters can be done, it is imperative to make sure that the senior management team internalises the need to focus as much on building high-performance individuals as they do on growth, profitability and the like. This becomes easier to accept and implement if we go back to the basic premise that great companies, perhaps, become and stay that way because they have found ways to maximise individual value addition even as they focus on maximisation of the company's performance vectors. A legitimate question that arises is how far does an organisation need to go in being sensitive to its people when the pressures to perform on the financial parameters seem paramount? I would argue that this is where a performance-oriented but empathetic approach can play a critical role. The need is to recognise that empathy and performance are not antithetical in nature. Done right, they can actually reinforce one another.

The case can be made that while performance parameters lend themselves to being captured in numbers, the softer aspects relating to people, perhaps, do not. I feel that the parameters to report on people performance will get created if the need for the same is felt as intensely as the need for numbers.

The writer is corporate advisor to 3i Infotech and Manipal Education and Medical Group. He can be reached at mcshekaran@gmail.com

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