Product Description

The Hudson Highland Center for High Performance recently completed the largest and most in-depth global study ever done of the factors that accelerate or stifle high performance. The alarming conclusion: only 10 percent of knowledge workers are part of a high-performing workgroup, one that makes money for the company and is creating a new product or service.

Contagious Success reveals Susan Lucia Annunzio’s proven strategies for identifying, nurturing, and replicating business units that are already high performing. These workgroups tend to be ignored while senior management focuses on fixing its lowest performing units. But Annunzio argues for the opposite strategy: Focus on the groups that are doing the best work in the organization, learn their secrets, and help spread their expertise to the average groups.

Annunzio focuses on groups, not individuals, because even a great individual can’t succeed in a weak environment. By using the high-performing groups to improve just the top 20 percent of the average performers—what Annunzio calls "moving the middle"—a company can achieve dramatic, sustainable growth in revenue and profits.

This is a book for leaders who want to unleash the hidden potential in their organizations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #613850 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-04
• Released on: 2004-11-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Booklist
Annunzio is chair and CEO of the Hudson Highland Center for High Performance, and the extensive, worldwide research she and her group completed, into how to define and secure "high performance environments that deliver exceptional results," stands behind this energizing guide to sustaining and duplicating such environments. "Success is contagious" is the stated premise of the book; upon concluding, from the research, that only a small percentage of workers are high performers, Annunzio not only explains the traits of a high performer but also recommends that managers "spread the secrets" of these workers so "you can improve the overall performance of your company." The secrets center on high performers' particular styles, techniques, and energy and how they can easily be adapted for lower-performing workers. Managers are the target audience of this book, but the information gathered and the concepts promoted here will have relevance and interest for anyone who finds business philosophy engaging. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Susan Lucia Annunzio is chairman and CEO of the Hudson Highland Center for High Performance, a subsidiary of Hudson Highland Group, Inc. The author of Evolutionary Leadership and coauthor of Communicoding, she advises senior executives around the world and is an adjunct professor of management at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

It’s the Workgroup
Success is contagious. That’s the premise of this book.

Every company has high-performing workgroups that both make money for the business and develop new products, services, or markets. These workgroups create environments in which results are achieved and people flourish. High-performing groups adapt quickly to changes in the marketplace, understand their customers, and know how to get the internal resources they need to accomplish their goals.

If you spread the secrets of these groups, you can improve the overall performance of your company.

Just as the leaders of Wal-Mart think of their highly successful company as a series of individual stores, you can think of your company, regardless of size, as a series of workgroups. As Robert Slater wrote in The Wal-Mart Decade, “. . . the only way to manage such a large and complex organization is to think of it not as large and complex, but think of it as simply a series of individual units, that is, the stores. ‘We run the business a store at a time,’ said [David] Glass [president and CEO from 1988 to 2000]. ‘How do you run a $240 billion retail business? I don’t have a clue. But I know how to run retail stores.’ ”

How do you run a business in today’s uncertain global environment? How do you improve performance in an era of tightening budgets, reduced resources, and increasing demands? The answer is to support your workgroups so they can generate new ideas to fuel profitable growth.

A workgroup can be a few people or a few hundred; it is the unit responsible for driving results. Workgroups can be formed based on functional areas (the marketing department); divisions within functional areas (the creative group); client; or product line. They can be permanent, or temporarily brought together to achieve a single purpose. Workgroups form their own smaller cosmos within the larger company. They are united by common goals and shared experience.

In this book, I will introduce you to some highly successful workgroups. Among others, you will meet:

• the Green Diesel Technology team at International Truck and Engine Corporation, which played a major role in preserving the diesel industry while creating a significant growth opportunity for the company.
• the People and Culture department at Microsoft UK, which helped make the company the United Kingdom’s IT employer of choice, and generates 30 percent more revenue per employee than any other division of Microsoft worldwide.
• the Kellogg Food Away From Home marketing department, whose efforts resulted in nearly 10 percent profit growth between 2002 and 2003. Growth due to innovation tripled between 2001 and 2003.
• the Foreign Exchange Institutional Sales team at ABN AMRO, which advises financial institutions on how to optimize returns on currency management. The team was on pace to achieve $20 million in revenue in 2004, up approximately 67 percent from $12 million in 2002.

All of these workgroups have created high-performance environments that deliver exceptional results. Unfortunately, there are too few of such groups. Recent groundbreaking research on the workgroups of knowledge workers found that only 10 percent of these highly paid and well-educated respondents could provide evidence that their workgroup was high performing—that it made money for the company and introduced new products, services, or processes. The study was undertaken by the Hudson Highland Center for High Performance, which I lead. (See Appendix 1 for details on how the research was conducted.)

To increase performance, companies need to focus on the single factor that is most critical to high performance—the environment of their workgroups. According to Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, “Four decades of scientific research have shown that situations are powerful determinants of human behavior—and much more powerful determinants than most of us realize.”

Gilbert continued, “We are exquisitely social animals who respond instantly to the most subtle demands of our social environments, but because those demands are so subtle, we often make the mistake of attributing these responses to internal characteristics such as motives, beliefs, traits, attitudes, desires, and intentions. We tend to think that people ‘are the way they act’ because we fail to recognize how much of their action is guided, shaped, influenced, and dictated by the situation in which it unfolds.”

Instead of concentrating on the environment of their workgroups, too many companies focus on allocating financial capital and deploying human resources. On the financial side, their goal is to achieve the best return on investment, measured by profitable growth, meeting investment community expectations, or increasing shareholder value. Due to limited time and unprecedented pressure, senior leaders expend most of their energy managing the numbers. That often means reducing costs and limiting investments to grow profits.

At the same time, most companies want to be employers of choice, and consequently they don’t ignore their people. By activities such as pay for performance, performance management, leadership development, and training, they reward performance, especially that of high-potential workers. They measure return on human capital based on how successfully they recruit and retain the best and brightest individuals for their workforce. Managing financial and human capital are necessary activities, but they are not sufficient for high performance. Most companies assume that if they provide their workgroups with reasonable financial targets and the right people, they will automatically be able to achieve a high return on their investment. But this assumption is faulty. To achieve the best return on financial and human capital investment, leaders need to deliberately create workgroup environments that can sustain high performance.

“Changing the situation and shaping the environment—that’s what leadership is all about,” noted Linda Ginzel, clinical professor of managerial psychology at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

There’s no question that individual performance does matter. People need to be trained, developed, and given appropriate rewards and incentives. It is also good business to monitor and measure performance. But individual performance is influenced by the environment. If the best and brightest people are not in the right environment, they will not do their best work. Stars in under-performing workgroups won’t shine as brightly. Michael Jordan was already a star when he joined the Chicago Bulls. However, it was not until Phil Jackson became head coach that the basketball team started winning championships. Jackson created an environment in which all the members of the team could excel. When Coach Herb Brooks chose college players for the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, he did not select the stars; he chose those who could gel as a team. The United States beat the highly favored Soviet team to win the gold medal, in what Sports Illustrated called the “greatest sports moment in the 20th century.”

These examples demonstrate that in a team sport, an individual performer cannot win a championship alone. Business is a team sport.

Times Have Changed
The way workgroups are managed today is critically important—even more so than in the past. This is because times have changed. In the Industrial Age, the assembly line fueled economic success. Business decisions were less complex, competition was clear, and how to make money was more straightforward. Top-down, command-and-control leadership was effective; plant workers needed to follow directions and do precisely what they were told. It wasn’t necessary or helpful for them to think creatively to do their jobs.

Today, that model no longer works. The business environment is uncertain, markets are saturated, capital is scarce, industries are consolidated, and products are commoditized. Customers have more choices, so companies have to work harder to understand and meet their needs.

To be sustainable, companies have to grow revenues; cutting costs is not sufficient nor is operational excellence. The only way they can grow revenues is to differentiate themselves by creating new products, services, and markets. Workers can no longer simply follow orders. Now they need to use their brainpower to foster growth.

Whirlpool Corporation, based in Benton Harbor, Michigan, expects all employees to come up with new ways to meet customer needs. “We feel like everyone from the very top of the organization to the people on the manufacturing floors can contribute to driving relationships with our customers,” said Donna Samulowitz, Whirlpool’s vice president of Global Customer Loyalty.

Samulowitz said that Whirlpool is not abandoning the core strengths that grew the business to where it is today. “Our trade partner relationships and our operational excellence are still critical, but they are not enough. To drive our growth goals, we recognize the importance of customer loyalty, which comes from meeting customers’ needs through new products and services, and staying with the customer throughout their relationship with our brands.”

Samulowitz added, “It’s critical that everybody play a part in driving innovation. Unique solutions can come from anywhere in the organization as long as people have the right focus.”

This approach requires leaders to act differently than in the past. The strategies that worked in the Industrial Age are no longer effective. Leaders need to be honest about their own strengths and weaknesses. They must recognize that they can’t be or do everything and, therefore, should make sure the people around them have complementary strengths.

“Arrogance is out of fashion in the executive suite. So are autocratic executives who rule by intimidation, think they have all the answers and don’t believe they need to be accountable to anyone,” wrote Carol Hymowitz in the Wall Street Journal. She added that executives who are not...

Customer Reviews

Substantive and executable
Contagious Success is eye-opening, meaty, and filled with advice that can be readily applied to the real business world. Annunzio identifies the factors that distinguish high-performance workgroups, with findings drawn from her team's comprehensive, worldwide study of 3,104 knowledge workers in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia. (A knowledge worker is defined as a full-time manager, professional, or technical expert who holds at least a bachelor's degree and whose earnings are within the top 10% of his or her country.) Annunzio suggests that three main factors distinguish high-performance groups: valuing people, optimizing critical thinking, and seizing opportunities. While these factors are hardly surprising, what is remarkable is the mountain of conventional wisdom that Annunzio challenges. For example, Annunzio found that pay ranked fifth in terms of what makes high-performance groups effective - behind values, teamwork, people, and planning. Another insight is that 40% of respondents could show no evidence at all that their workgroups are doing something tangible. (Remember: these are college-educated professionals in the top 10% income bracket - folks who are at least theoretically rewarded for high performance.) A third revelation is that a mere 10% of workgroups qualify as high performing (high performance is defined by demonstrable revenue/profit improvement as well as product or service innovations). A final key revelation is that most knowledge workers confuse performance with productivity -- a vestige perhaps of the industrial revolution, yet a nugget of wisdom worth remembering in this day of Blackberries, cell phones, and the other accoutrements that offer up a false sense of success simply by making us feel busy. Annunzio also suggests how to apply these insights to the real business world in order to improve profits. Here is a sampling of what one might describe as her "Roadmap for Profits"... Rule #1: The best way to achieve performance growth is to increase the performance of your best workgroups. (Most companies focus on hacking off the bottom tier.) Rule #2: Respectfully communicate (always assume good intent, try to understand a person's logic), since a failure to do so makes us run the risk of missing out on brilliant ideas. Rule #3, 4, and 5: Encourage risk-taking, create an environment in which people see mistakes as opportunities for learning, and give employees "amnesty" to speak openly about unspeakable subjects. Only through such open-mindedness do knowledge workers have a fighting chance of pushing their businesses to the next frontier. Annunzio provides many other executable ideas, and her numerous examples and citations help offer a much richer, nuanced understanding than I could ever provide in a brief review. One of the more interesting business books to come along in a long time.

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR HI-PERFORMING KNOWLEDGE-WORKER GROUPS?
Based on a study of 3,104 knowledge workers in the U.S. and 9 other countries, the author has identified the qualities of high-performing groups, i. e., those that get financial results, through being the best in developing and introducing new products, services and markets. The overall conclusion is that knowledge workers who work in environments in which 1) they are valued, 2) can do their best thinking, and 3) have the freedom to seize opportunities, constitute high-performing work groups. Such groups are adaptable, knowledgeable, and resourceful. The book goes into many factors that explain the success of these groups, offering many case examples drawn from the extensive research. The insights of this book are readily accessible. The book is written in a to-the-point, very readable style. But most importantly, it offers some mind-broadening findings that, for some, may appear to be a challenge to conventional thinking. Speaking as an organization consultant (www.FutureOrganization.com), as well as a reviewer, this book shines forth as offering some solid, although not altogether surprising, conclusions. Bottom line: highly recommended-well worth the reading.

How to manage obsession with quarterly earnings
I thought that this book offers common-sense approach to business leaders striving to attain profitable growth in an age of cost-cutting. The author's thought-provoking commentary on the global state of underperformance is a wake up call for management and employees alike. Lessons about creating an environment that inspires employees to high performance are accessible, attainable and well documented with interesting case histories about companies who are doing it right. It is an enjoyable read with solid lessons for rethinking the current business mentality obsessed with quarterly earnings.