Overwhelmed with your days right now? Underwhelmed with your business or job?

Let me re-introduce you to …connection… starting with the people around you…

I’m a bottom-line gal… and I am here to tell you to get social within your organization. I am positive that doing so will improve performance across the organization. No worries if you haven’t really excelled at this to date. We can tell and if you look around you, you are not the only one. (and it’s not your fault entirely… technology, and actually performance management systems specifically, has played a role in this trouble and I’ll get to that later in this series). But you CAN realize improvement quickly, by making a few small shifts in how you connect with people.

So how you do this without changing who you are?

Being an introvert myself, I believe I can shed some real light on this subject for all CEOs, CXOs and HR leaders who care about people but may not feel that “gregarious,” “people-person,” or even “social” fits you. The people working with you—for you—are needing to connect. And when you connect in an effective way, you are going to have a great bonus: higher productivity leading to higher profits … and you are going to enjoy your days more. I refer to this often as “doing the right things right.”

Will it take too much time?

Not if you follow the steps I will give you, including systematizing what’s working.

You need to get to what’s real in order to lead. To do that, you must connect with people. I also refer to this as “collaborative action.” Brand it how you like—just do it.

To do this in a way that brings bottom-line results requires aligning roles with your strategy and aligning people’s strengths and desires with those roles. And, really, it is going to take some thoughtfulness from you, but not a lot of time ’cause you’re going to systematize it…

Ok, so let’s get collaborative for peak performance!

Here’s your first step:

1. Re-visit your strategy, and then select three or fewer critical objectives or themes that you must do or start doing now to thrive (or even survive). When you are done you’ll have a short list that may look something like one of these:

a) stop the bleeding, retain top talent, continue to invest in what is working
b) get visible!, systematize everything, hire smarter
c) cost-effective compliance, speed to market, shareholder confidence
d) merge lean, one version of the truth, market leader
e) …. (yours)

I’ll send a new step once or twice per week so check back again. Or register at www.collaborative-action.com (right nav), just with your name and email, and these steps will be pushed to your inbox along with some free stuff that will never be posted on the blog. You can also request an RSS feed (find the RSS icon in the upper right corner of our home page) if you only want to see the blog posts.