By Dr. Irma Campos at GrowSpan Consulting, LLC (www.growspanconsulting.com)
In Miami, Florida, it’s not always sunshine, palm trees, and rainbows for midsize or medium businesses. Miami’s mid-size businesses operate in one of the most competitive and fast-moving (we are not just talking about the traffic) markets. With multicultural and multilingual teams, concentration of economic power among fewer people, and numerous other (e.g., geopolitical, technological) changes, organizations can struggle to maintain productivity while engaging high-performing employees as they scale and grow.
After building a business that has served the community, often employing others and facilitating employee development, midsize business owners deserve to have science-based and effective tools to thrive and not just survive. Consultants often see that employee productivity, psychological well-being, and employee engagement are intertwined, especially for midsize businesses that are judiciously growing and scaling their presence. To scale appropriately, however, specific leadership skills have to be at the forefront of training and development. And in order for training and development to be effective, it should be based on both leadership science and practice that has been proven to work.
Research and practice in psychology and leadership development underscore that high-performing teams and businesses are built with intentionality. They are built through replicable systems that incorporate leadership knowledge, behavior, skills, and abilities at all levels. For Miami business owners, middle managers, front-line managers, and executives, understanding the psychology of performance and engaging people can create a major competitive advantage. This understanding can also help business owners retain ownership of their companies without involvement of investors or other entities.
Why Performance Declines in Growing Companies
Many mid-size businesses in Miami experience similar challenges as they scale, including:
- Communication barriers between departments
- Increasing turnover and associated costs
- Lower employee engagement due to change fatigue
- Employee accountability challenges
- Decision fatigue among managers
Research from American Psychological Association supports that workplace stress and leadership challenges can impact productivity, retention, engagement (note: we use the term engagement more often because leaders should think beyond retention), and organizational performance. Workplace stress can be cumulative, so sometimes it can take time to impact an organization too. In order to support organizations in not just addressing workplace stress but also bringing out the best in their people, we offer five strategies leaders can implement immediately.
5 Science-Based Strategies to Improve Performance
1. Strengthen Leadership Communication
Research in organizational behavior shows that unclear communication is one of the most significant predictors of workplace challenges.
High-performing leaders:
- Set clear expectations for other leaders and employees
- Create and communicate a vision for why change is happening
- Communicate priorities especially when change is happening
- Give frequent and specific feedback (both constructive and strengths-based)
Leadership communication becomes especially important in Miami’s multicultural and multilingual business environment, where diverse communication styles, languages, values, and norms can create misunderstanding if not managed intentionally. When managed well, collaboration among diverse backgrounds can also be an organization’s strength, predictive of innovation, agility, and more.
Action Step 1:
Implement weekly leadership alignment meetings with KPIs and accountability metrics that are realistic and integrate the organization’s cultural values. Leaders should also do the same with their direct reports, providing more support (e.g., training opportunities, coaching) to those who need it.
2. Improve Psychological Safety
Teams and entire organizations perform better when employees feel safe to respectfully share their ideas, concerns, perceptions, and other internal processes. When this occurs, innovation and other positive outcomes can occur.
According to research from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety increases learning behavior, between and within team collaboration, and innovation.
Leaders can improve psychological safety by:
- Encouraging employee input and actually applying the input, when possible
- Reinforcing collaborative problem-solving and other positive, culturally aligned behaviors
- Asking the right questions with depth and intention while listening carefully
Action Step 2:
Use anonymous employee feedback surveys every quarter. Be sure to actually implement the feedback provided, when possible. Otherwise, you might risk losing trust and generating survey/feedback fatigue.
3. Reduce and Address Employee Burnout and Distress
Burnout is one of the most significant threats to team performance in high-growth businesses.
The World Health Organization recognizes burnout as an occupational phenomenon linked to chronic workplace stress. As a business psychologist, I also see the impact of general mental health conditions increasing for employees and their families. So taking care of your employees’ and their families’ mental health is imperative. As a general rule of thumb, for mental health conditions, the earlier the intervention, the better the outcome.
Common signs of burnout include:
- Reduced engagement
- Emotional exhaustion
- More frequent physical symptoms, like headaches
- Increased absenteeism
- Lower productivity, clearly shifting from a previous baseline
- Increased workplace conflict across situations
Action Step 3:
Train managers and other leaders to identify early burnout or mental distress indicators. Refer employees to the appropriate service for support. When possible, offer services such as high-quality, science-based mental health counseling or therapy in your organization. Not all counseling or psychotherapy is the same, though, so carefully determine what types of counseling are most necessary and effective for your employees’ needs.
4. Use Data-Driven Performance Systems
It is most helpful to inform decisions guided by clearly defined qualitative and quantitative data instead of assumptions. While intuition has its place as a leader, effective companies track:
- Employee engagement
- Productivity metrics
- Patient, client, or customer engagement and retention
- Leadership effectiveness, such as through 360 or competency-based assessments
- Turnover trends and costs
Organizational psychology research shows that employees perform better when goals are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-sensitive
Action Step 4:
Create quarterly performance scorecards for both leadership teams and employees.
5. Invest in Ongoing Leadership Development Programs
Some medium-size businesses promote strong employees into leadership positions without training on the performance management component of leadership. But technical or financial expertise does not automatically translate into leadership effectiveness. Leadership often involves a different set of skills, knowledge, abilities and other characteristics (e.g., strong interpersonal skills, openness to experiences, influence, persuasion, multicultural knowledge/behaviors, perspective-taking).
Leadership development programs, when customized and informed by both science and practice, can improve the following:
- Executive Functioning or Advanced Thinking Skills
- Emotion Regulation or Advanced Emotion Management
- Strategic Decision-making for Long-Term Planning
- Team Motivation
- Strategic and Cross-Functional Team Communication
- Managing Changes Related to AI
Businesses that invest in high-quality leadership training and executive or leadership coaching often experience stronger retention and higher team engagement.
Action Step 5:
Provide concurrent, evidence-based executive coaching and leadership development workshops for managers and department heads on an ongoing basis.
Why Organizational Psychology Matters for Miami Businesses
Miami businesses face unique workforce challenges:
- Rapid population growth
- Competitive labor markets
- Diverse cultural and linguistic communication styles
- Financial pressures
- Fast changes
- Hybrid and remote workforce transitions
- AI Transformation and Change
Organizational psychology helps businesses create systems that improve both employee well-being and operational performance. Organizational psychology can help businesses do this without involving an investor or other entity.
By combining behavioral science with leadership strategy, companies can improve:
- Productivity
- Employee engagement and long-term contribution
- Workplace culture
- Accountability with less oversight
- Financial and related performance
- Community Impact
The most successful mid-size businesses in Miami apply customized and evidence-based leadership practices rooted in organizational psychology and behavioral science that have been proven to work.
When companies create psychologically safe environments, strengthen leadership communication, address burnout and mental distress on both the front-end and back-end, and build measurable performance systems, teams become more collaborative and productive. The longevity of a team and employee says it all.
In today’s competitive Miami business environment, investing in psychologically-informed workplace interventions may be one of the highest-return decisions a company can make. If you are a business owner with a growing team, find support because business owners should not carry the weight and pressures of managing a team alone.