Within other articles, you'll find more specific help to leverage cloverleaf with 1-1 or team coaching. Let’s take it up a level for those of you who may be working with senior leaders or HR teams in trying to affect organizational change.
The purpose of this article is to help spark your own creativity to present the use of Cloverleaf to existing or prospective organizational clients.
A Cloverleaf Analogy
If you are a facilitator or trainer, you probably like to use analogies. One way to refer to Cloverleaf with organizations is comparing it to vitamins.
Sure, you can try to get all of your vitamins from your daily intake of food, but if you really want health or immune support at another level, chances are you may be popping a D3 or some Omega-3’s to support your daily functioning.
This is the boost that Cloverleaf truly gives - the same way vitamins provide a heightened amount of nutrients the body needs,
Cloverleaf elevates awareness to help individuals and teams increase their workplace and organizational health. It works alongside any work of internal or external resources in the fields of organizational development, L&D or HR.
Many of the organizational challenges leaders face, cause them reach out to a coach or consultant with tangible business challenges.
Before we go deeper with positioning Cloverleaf, let’s take a deeper dive on some of the organizational challenges you might be faced with solving.
Organizational Health
What does that even mean anyway? You can google your way through many rabbit holes on this one, but let’s turn to a notable thought leader in this area.
Patrick Lencioni frames it in terms of impact:
“The financial cost of having an unhealthy organization is undeniable: wasted resources and time, decreased productivity, increased employee turnover, and customer attrition.”
So what do healthy organizations look like?
When organizations are healthy, people, processes, systems and customers are in sync. There is a clear and common goal within the organization and that experience is passed to the customer. There is also a specific and well-communicated organizational strategy supporting this that everyone is connected to.
Many consultants are brought in to look at organizational health under the guise of trying to be more productive and profitable. Senior leaders often want a quick transactional fix, but any good consultant will look at one big issue to get the core of org health: engagement.
The Engagement Game
According to the Gallup®’s 2020 State of the American workplace, only 33% of employees are engaged at work.
Just about half (51%) say they are either actively looking for work or keeping an eye out for a better opportunity. Employers lose billions every year in turnover. Often this issue is related to other issues of performance, productivity, team cohesion, and communication.
An engaged workplace is not just for startups with ball pits and free beer after work anymore. Companies literally cannot afford to let engagement drop.
The science of engagement has been pretty consistent over the course of the past decade. Senior leaders also want to know that at the end of the day, it will link to profitability and we can’t be afraid to make that connection.
When engagement is high, this has a direct impact on both the internal and external environment. Yes, team connectedness is actually a thing.
”Highly engaged business units realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity. Engaged workers also are more likely to stay with their employers. In high-turnover organizations, highly engaged business units achieve 24% less turnover...Highly engaged business units achieve a 10% increase in customer ratings and a 20% increase in sales.” (Gallup®)
Along with coaching, training and project related interventions, Cloverleaf can be the secret weapon to support your wider initiatives.
So how does Cloverleaf support increased engagement?
It starts at the level of the individual. By giving each person the opportunity to increase self-awareness, Cloverleaf offers an opportunity for each person to grow and engage in their own development. Just the fact that an organization is giving employees this opportunity is an exercise in improving organizational loyalty. When an employee sees an outward sign of investing in their development, you begin to tap into discretionary effort. This is where the secret to unlocking engagement lies. You want people who are WILLING to go above and beyond.
Daily Coaching Tips keep development and engagement at the forefront by giving behavioral cues and raising the consciousness of the person receiving them.
When we integrate development into everyday worg, we are tapping into the potential of each individual. As people tap into their own potential through increased understanding, there is an organic shift into more intentional work getting done.
It gets teams talking.
The team dashboard takes the relationships between team members and puts it all out on the table. By understanding more about each person, what motivates them and how they think, people can begin to see each other as human beings first. This increased understanding between team members starts to shift the experience of the workplace. People that are working in collaboration can deepen their ability to work effectively together and leverage the talents that a project or initiative needs.
It acts as a support to leadership development.
The use of Cloverleaf helps organizations to support their standard for leadership. By employing the use of Cloverleaf’s unique integration of assessment data, it becomes a tool to crystallize what it means to be an effective leader - and an ineffective one too!
Jim Clifton, Gallup® Chairman and CEO and the author of “It’s the Manager” shares in an interview: “Gallup® has discovered that a staggering 70% of the variation between great workplace engagement and lousy workplace engagement can be explained just by the quality of the manager or team leader.”
Cloverleaf can pair nicely here with executive coaching and leadership development initiatives by prompting opportunities for powerful conversations and training experiences.
It unearths communication gaps to drive performance.
As people and teams develop more awareness of themselves and each other, communication gaps are able to surface and can be filled. According to Towers Watson, “Organizations with effective change and communication programs are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers.” The visual mapping on the team dashboard as well as being able to understand the similarities and differences between your team members will zero in on those communication gaps, impacting team cohesion, productivity and performance.
In order for Cloverleaf to be effective in an organization, it takes a champion on the inside.
It’s critical to work with stakeholders to support and engage with Cloverleaf and develop a powerful communication plan for why Cloverleaf is being implemented and what the expectation is for usage. This brings us to a larger conversation about strategy which I will address in a future guide.
In the meantime, it's your job as the coach and consultant to position Cloverleaf in the way that makes the most sense for your projects.