The answers to these questions define the system’s identity.

The leader’s role, at whatever level of the organization, involves articulating and disseminating a common identity throughout the organization.

Leaders must attend to the conversations in the workforce, and act to create and sustain a focused sense of shared identity.

Next, the IRI Model posits that to be effective, all organizational outcomes require relationships with other members of the system: an individual within a system should not function in isolation.

Organizations have tried to re-invent themselves to accommodate changing market requirements. This is why hierarchical organizations have proven to be so troublesome as collaboration and cross-functional partnering has grown in importance.

Key questions emerge about organizational relationships.

• With which people must I interact to accomplish the organization’s mission?

• How must I interact in order for the system to function optimally?

• Leaders must be astute at tending to and enabling these relationships.

You can tell people what they have to do together, but that isn’t enough to cause people to be enthusiastic about those relationships.

The relationships that support outstanding performances have to make sense to the people involved.

They need to understand how relating to each other in the prescribed ways, leads to success for the company as a whole.

People don’t have to like each other, but they have to realize an impact stemming from their collaboration.

In organizations, relationships become formalized as processes. A robust system views its processes as opportunities for conversation about operational and strategic concerns.

The system then facilitates the kinds of relationships that will enable those conversations to take place.

• What are we doing well?

• What could we do better?

• What does the environment have to say about us?

• What do we have to learn to do that we don’t do now?

Leaders need to model a concern about the answers to these questions.

If you don’t let your people know that you care, they’ll soon stop caring themselves.

You can’t just say that you care about the answers to these questions; you have to prove by listening carefully to those answers as they are given to you.

In this networked organization, everyone is expected to look beyond their job to think about ways to improve the system as a whole.

Relationships, then, are the key to the IRI Model. Ultimately, because relationships center on trust, it is crucial for organizations to seek ways to establish and enhance trusting relationships.

It is only through the evolution of a trusting work culture that highly developed relationship skills can develop in organizations.

Finally, identity-focused action-relationships in networked organizations require quick, targeted sharing of information: what information has to flow within the relationship in order to fulfill the purpose of the system.

Systems find ways to transmit vital information, often in spite of formal processes. Fundamental to an organized transmission are opportunities for people to talk together about the work, and listening accurately to what others have to say.

The IRI Model shows that systems achieve results through interdependent processes.

Heightened effectiveness and efficiency arises when all relationships within the system are maximized. If the interactions are going to be optimized, required information has to flow with little resistance. No matter where one sits in such a system, one has to be able to determine what needs to happen now, from a relationship standpoint, that will allow the right kind of information to flow so that those involved can accomplish what’s needed.

As such, real value creation takes place within the relationships; the level of intimacy that relationships attain ultimately determines the limits on a company’s potential for success. People can be pushed and driven to great productivity, but ultimately, driven people won’t produce as much as people who push themselves to achieve their utmost.