High-performance organizations, like Google, Apple, Starbucks, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, have not only changed the way we live but also altered the business paradigms in their respective industries. However, all these organizations share one common trait; a demonstrated commitment to the values and vision that they stand for. Thus, young leaders and entrepreneurs must have strong foundational values and get the basics right if they hope to achieve success. These values can be only be found after comprehensively introspecting one's goals and asking yourself the right questions. Here are four questions that you must ask yourself if you are striving to build a high-performance organization:

Do you have the right people in the right roles?

There are no two doubts about the fact that a high-performance organization is built on the back of great talent. However, you need to ensure that people with the right skills and attitude are in the right role to achieve extraordinary results. A robust talent acquisition process that helps you evaluate candidates on all fronts is critical to help you find the right talent and put them in the right position. Similarly, dedicated lateral movement platforms, skilling opportunities, objective performance assessment tools, formal and informal mentorship programs are equally essential to ensure that people with the right skills are doing the work they do best.  

What type of culture do you want to build?

A vital component of a high-performance organization is a workplace culture that is enabling, creative, and conducive. All progressive work cultures share a few characteristics; namely, authenticity, openness, transparency, accountability, and freedom to experiment. Thus, you must build work processes and systems that are true to these values and instead of quantifying culture, strive to establish consistency in driven, respectful, and moral behavior. Remember, healthy and productive workplace cultures take time and effort to manifest and are a result of loyalty, truth, and ownership. Your people's policies must create a culture that encourages employees to be independent, accountable, innovative, and honest. 

How will people communicate and collaborate?

One of the most vital pieces of the puzzle is to establish processes that allow employees to communicate and collaborate intuitively. This includes communication among employees and from leaders to employees to create a space for everyone to ask questions, praise good work, and offer feedback. Similarly, you need to set clear expectations from managers and employees to help them align the personal development journey of the workforce to that of the organization. In addition to weaving collaborative tools into your organization processes and workflows, you can also set up communication policies, meeting formats, inter-and-intra team interactions, information flows, and feedback mechanisms. 

How will employees remain motivated and engaged?

Finally, you need to formulate checks and systems that will keep employees happy and productive. To truly engage your workforce, you need to understand the motivations of your employees, the environment that they thrive in, their communication style, their values, and interests. In addition to devising effective rewards policies, you need to offer your workforce meaningful work opportunities and create objective performance measurement parameters that help identify the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce. 

Thus, what might seem like fundamental management and leadership questions are actually fundamental to the process of building a high-performance organization. Simply emulating best practices or following industry leaders is never enough, and never will be because, at the heart of a high-performance organization, there is a drive to be better, original, and authentic. No matter the size of your organization, you can build a high-performing culture and company by committing to and upholding some critical values and creating an environment of trust, agility, and innovation.