How to make your business immune to the perils of negative thinking

The Challenge today is not markets, products or services, but people.

As the UK government’s spending strategy kicks in we might reflect on our own approach to the current turbulent times. Whilst some are battening down the hatches others are being opportunists. Whilst some are cutting resources others are planting new seeds.

However you are feeling it is clear that promoting and selling goods and services is more challenging than ever, but this is not, and never has been the biggest challenge to an aspiring business. If you look beneath the credit crunch headlines you will find that employee engagement is the holy grail of both productivity and change. But why didn’t money lenders and traders change their behaviour before it was too late? They were certainly engaged, but with the wrong activities and decisions. They didn’t change because they were stuck in a routine of social compliance – few people want to be the first one to step out of the routine and make the first change.

Social Compliance – the key to health and longevity in business

If we learn anything from our situation it has to include the different approaches to survival, sustainability and growth. We know that fear breeds fear, and the most impressionable among us will be influenced adversely by the prophets of doom and gloom. Social compliance tells them to adopt the attitudes and actions of the lowest common denominator generated by a small but highly influential group of economic and media professionals who are broadcasting negativity, doubt and scarcity.

Those who prefer to think for themselves, and who have a more optimistic disposition will already be sewing seeds which will bear new fruit as the economic climate regains a healthy balance. The more they hear the cry of Armageddon the more they see the competition wilting, and this offers a range of opportunities in the most challenging area of all – your people and the way they think.

In every company people find ways of being inefficient. The obvious causes are arguments, procrastination, over-competitiveness, duplication, routines with no valuable outcome, stress, mistakes and general incompetence. If your car was this inefficient you would take it back to the dealer. If a business process was this inefficient you would find a way to fix it. But because it is difficult to measure the efficiency of people this important aspect of a business can be its Achilles heal.

Are you trying to measure the immeasurable?

People are inefficient for a number of reasons. Some people just see barriers and limitations in their work. Others have simply developed habits or routines that are no longer required, but which they find hard to break (the word most often used to describe money traders leading up to the credit crunch is ‘frenzied). Low confidence in managers has a knock-on effect with their teams, and all kinds of poor decisions are made as a result of stress, lack of knowledge, poor information, inadequate communication, bad assumptions or a lack of clarity in presenting information to others. Need I mention email etiquette?

With so many ways of being inefficient is it any wonder that the best we seem to do in measuring inefficiency is an attitude survey, or some form of performance measurement? Organisations measure what they can quantify. If it’s not so easy to quantify it often goes unmeasured – except that all these inefficiencies are observable – or at least the results are observable. They just don’t categorise easily so defy measurement and interpretation.

So is there a way of weeding out inefficiency? The answer of course is yes, but you have to shift how you think about the problem. Imagine inefficiency as a network of attitudes, beliefs and habits that are passed on like a virus. We know that social compliance is a major influence on how people think and behave in any organisation (read Robert Cialdini’s book ‘Influence’). This process is like any other – if you put garbage in you get garbage out. If you leave the social compliance process to take care of itself you don’t know what garbage people are processing. Yet by acknowledging the process you can be pro-active to ensure that good stuff is processed and any garbage is filtered out.

A cellular approach

When you start to feel ill your immune system fights whatever is attacking you by producing antibodies. Their job is to fight off the invading virus, toxins or parasites and keep you healthy. If you think of human attitudes and behaviours as either healthy or unhealthy it’s a small step to realise how they can attack other people through the process of social compliance (people will think, say and do what the majority think say and do). The CEO of one company we know is concerned that there is a growing belief that their customers are incompetent. This is clearly not helping them win business. The executive team of an international retailing outfit is fighting a growing disengagement amongst employees, and the conventional approaches to engagement have not helped.

In these cases and many more, inefficiency is growing as employees become evermore distracted from their goals. When people find other things to focus on productivity takes a knock. In all these cases we can begin to act like an immune system – one which kicks in at the earliest warning of a destructive invader – maybe a limiting belief, or poor attitude, or inappropriate assumption. What if you had a growing number of antibodies who could stop this type of attack before it takes root and reinforce positive empowering states instead? What if your defence was able to act under its own initiative wherever and whenever? How would this affect the way you do business? But how would you find and train these antibodies?

Forces for good

Just like your immune system has to create antibodies and build itself from nutrients in your food, you can develop forces for good in your organisation. These people are your most pro-active, positive, empowered individuals who have both the social skills and communication techniques to keep your business healthy on the occasions where others are most exposed to harmful viruses – at every interaction with another employee, supplier or customer. They know how to keep a positive outlook on events, how to cut through confusion to find clarity, how to question for facts and evidence, and how to see every niggle, frustration and problem as an opportunity to show excellence.

Where do you sit?

There are new ways emerging for taking care of business at the level of interaction. The question is – are you still trying to fix a modern problem with outdated ideas of training and development, or are you ready to discover what others are already implementing? Whether you are a company CEO, a manager or indeed anyone who really wants to make a positive contribution to the sustainability of your business, it could pay real dividends to find out how to develop your forces for good and become immune to the invading forces of low productivity, inefficiency and pessimism. And this is so much more than mere positive thinking. It is a high level ability to influence others to do a great job – both as individuals and as team players.

RealSuccess

When we designed our flagship programme RealSuccess we intended it to be a complete immersion experience giving participants personal support for their development. The formula has been proven over many years and today we are developing permanent forces for good in our client organisations. Some call them ‘champions’, others ‘agents of change’. However they are referred to, they do the same job of keeping a workforce both productive and open to change.

David Molden, Chartered fellow CIPD, Director Quadrant 1 International.