In First Person: Leading Healthy Organizations

In an interview, Chris Gagnon, solution partner at McKinsey & Co's Organizational Health Index, talked about healthy organizations. Gagnon said the key thing in organizational health doesn't just mean ensuring that "people are happy." Nor is it about corporate culture for culture's sake. The underlying concept is that performance and organizational health are inextricably linked. There is no lasting, long-term performance without real organizational health. It's all about driving performance. Well, over time, their consultants had been getting more and more questions from our clients about how they should tackle the nontechnical, "softer" aspects of their businesses. They built the tool called the Organizational Health Index (OHI) that his Solutions team now runs. So far, OHI has helped literally thousands of companies to perform better, allowing them to see how they stack up against industry averages -- and more importantly, how they compare with the healthiest organizations in the world.