How healthy are you? How healthy are your people? How healthy is your
organization?

These are vitally important questions—the answers to which determine the limits of your life, your team’s effectiveness, and your organization’s success. These questions are interrelated. Your team and your organization have a direct impact on your own health and well-being. And your organization’s performance and success are dependent on the health of its people. This symbiotic relationship between your people’s health and your organization’s health and performance may seem like a no-brainer. You might be thinking, “Of course that would be the case.” But in our research and experience in working with organizations over several decades, we find that very few organizations act on this understanding. If they do make some effort, we find that employees are typically offered some sort of wellness or workplace well-being program. These might be useful, necessary even, but not sufficient. And more importantly, they fail to address the organization’s strategic opportunity in organizing itself and developing more ways of working that actually promote and support employee health.

What if leaders seriously entertained the idea that higher performance is a result of businesses organizing around their people rather than people having to organize around the business? We have taken as fact that the way to increase productivity and profit is through an absolute adherence to Taylorism, the management theory made popular by Frederick Taylor that is characterized by standards, being mechanistic, inflexible, and precise. These ideas have made a significant contribution to our understanding of organizations and productivity; they have their place. However, the wholesale shift to this organizational mindset has its limits and isn’t without cost. We find that an adherence to old ways of working and relating results in a decreased sense of personal purpose and accomplishment, less role and strategic clarity, and disconnection and lack of control over one’s work environment. It’s unfortunate, as organizations then must invest in programs and interventions just to address the problems that this mindset created in the first place!

A people-centered workplace might seem like a tough shift to make. If you’re a leader, manager, or small business owner and looking to realize increased effectiveness with your people or productivity and financial results, reimagining how to organize your business and its culture seems like a bigger project than you might have the appetite for. The usual way of managing and leading may be tempting, but if you have picked up this book, we imagine that you’re open to making a shift in mental mindset and aligning your behaviors to achieve outsized business gains and, concurrently, have a more authentic and fulfilling experience as a leader. In other words, it’s worth the investment of creating a healthy place to work, and the energy you put into this will yield significant returns.

This book aims to equip leaders with a road map and tools to make a demonstrable impact with their people and their organization. We argue here that rather than work and the workplace being the cause of disease, dysfunction, and limited performance, a healthy workplace is the key to unlocking the full value of your people and your organization.