Is your organization “healthy”? How about your team? If you knew that the beliefs you held and the actions you took today (even small), would positively impact the health of your organization tomorrow, would you do it? I'm guessing you would.

While many think of "health" in the more traditional sense as "health & productivity," or fitness and wellness, it actually goes much deeper than that, offering tremendous opportunities for impacting your organization's emotional, energetic, and fiscal well being. Just like with attending to a personal fitness program, where you do something for your health every day to move you towards greater wellness, you can do little "somethings" everyday to move you towards organizational wellness. It doesn't take a lot, but it does take intention and focus.

This short article is about creating organizational health from the "inside out." Having a somewhat eclectic background in kinesiology, health & productivity, energy management, and leadership development, this is a topic near and dear to my heart, and one I find that provides lots of opportunity to help leaders stay on their "edge."When people think of health, they tend to think of physical and emotional health. Energy, vitality, healthy eating, exercise, etc. are all very important things and something that I've been integrating into my leadership work with execs for years. But there's also the "organizational health" --- the health of the whole organization.

Of course there's the physical component and benefits - less lost time, injuries, health care costs, etc. but there's also the mental, spiritual and leadership component. If you look at the DTE Model, and specifically "Tenet Three" of "Bootism™" (to learn more about "Bootism" and "Bootist Leadership™" email us or subscribe to our list - on the right hand side “opt-in” box - for a complimentary copy of the paper "Leading With Boots On: The Art of Bootism, 12 Hugs, and Cupcakes"), which is about "health, vitality and personal nourishment of the leader and organization," you'll see that creating a healthy organization means not only that you're attending to your own health, and your employees' health, but also to the health of your organization as a whole, its spirit, and relationships.

A couple of ways to do this include (and note that many of these cross into the other areas):

Creating healthy leadership through:
• Healthy communication
• Telling the truth
• Creating trust in the environment for productive feedback
• Direct engagement
• Clear roles
• Linking people's roles to the bottom line so they're bought in in a healthy manner

Creating healthy people by:
• Doing things that support on-site wellness
• Truly creating environments and mindsets that support them in taking care of themselves so they're the best instrument of change
• Valuing - truly valuing - and walking the talk of a healthy culture (that means you and your leadership team are on board here - doing the work too - modeling the behaviors and beliefs that create healthy leadership and support a healthy environment)
• Matching people up with the right roles
• Creating, sharing and supporting helpful and productive beliefs

Creating healthy energy by:
• Supporting people in honoring the "my business, your business, God's business" rule
• Paying attention to the energy of the individual, team and organization
• Nurturing and creating space and support for congruency in each individual
• Creating a clear vision and values for your team and organization (and even before that, supporting each person to have their own vision and values clarified.)
• Managing energy vs. time to create the greatest level of productivity and happiness for each person.

When you take a look at some of these and decide to make a conscious effort around raising the bar on 1, 2 or all of them, you'll find that the focus and energy around creating a healthy organization will go up. It doesn't take a lot - just one person to set the intention, decide and act can create ripple effects (as we all know!)

So, again, if you knew that shifting your attention and focus and doing something (even little) everyday would have a significant impact on your health and the health of your organization, now, a week from now, a month from now, and even more so a year from now, would you do it? I'll bet you would. Think about it, the beliefs that you hold today impact the decisions and behaviors you make tomorrow which all impacts what you have a year from now. Ready? Go!

To health all around,

Want to learn more about this? There are several ways you can do so:

• Engage with me to work with you, your team or your organization on its "health factor",
• Come to the Bootist Retreat later in July,
• Book me to speak at your next event,
• Work with me privately to integrate more of this into your own personal leadership,
• Join the DTE Power Pack Program (in fact, next month's module is on Energy Leadership, plus the foundation package alone addresses core elements for values and visioning. We're opening the program up to new members in the Fall!)

Interested? Email Us!