Business – It’s All About The People!

Have you ever wondered why sometimes businesses make irrational decisions?

Perhaps you have worked for or currently work in an organisation where you find that any change is a struggle.  Maybe you also find the people involved in decision making seem to make the wrong decisions. And sometimes they make these decisions for the wrong reasons thereby ending up with the wrong results?

Wouldn’t you prefer to be in an organisation where you can understand exactly what’s going on and where you can see the problems before they happen? Not only that but where you have also learned a way of being able to communicate to the people within that organisation allowing that organisation to meet their challenges, large and small?

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Businesses are often made up of multiple people and for some people involved in those businesses, regrettably, they haven’t really thought about that detail.

The fact: Businesses are just a collection of people that are there to do work towards a common goal or goal’s which allow them to be able to continue existing.  Every business is an example of this same methodology.

It is also fair to say that businesses share some of the same strengths and challenges that also exist when working with people on an individual basis! Once you start to understand some simple facts you will able to embrace the organisation in a way that allows you to communicate to the “whole” organisation and the individuals in a way they can all understand. You can start talking about some of the other deeper things that are driving that business and its people or the vision that it’s aiming to work towards.

When you’re thinking about how something works in a business, you need to consider all the experiences of the people that have written that organisations process or protocols.  You need to take into account the varied viewpoints that they have, all of their biases, all of their reasons for doing things.

This is crucial when you start to put in place any changes on top of the current way of working, or possibly introducing people to a brand new way of working with a new set of protocols.  If you are already talking in their language – that allows them to embrace the change. Because an organisation is just a collection of people with a common goal.

So, let’s talk about Goals and Drivers, things that everyone talks about in every management course you can ever go on. Sometimes you need to take off the “logical hat” that you are wearing, thinking that every business is logical, that every business works to a standard process flow; because you may well find, and I certainly have, that’s not always the case!

In many cases what may seem to be logical business process or protocol on the outside is just something that has been created by somebody in the past from their own set of biases and those biases have been put into the current process and into that logic.

If you think about people in an organisation, it’s very similar to a relay running team for instance.  If you have a relay team full of fantastic runners who are all working together as a great team, what you see is a fantastic result at the end of the race. They individually each make sure each handover is smooth and controlled as the key to the race is nearly always a clean handover.

Whereas, if you’ve got a relay team full of absolutely stunning individual runners but they were not necessarily working together as a team, what you might find is the handovers may not be quite as good.  Those transition points might not necessarily be as smooth as they should be therefore not achieving the result they wanted.

When you discuss the result with them and why the poor handovers occurred, you may find from the runners involved, someone might want to run first, some might want to run middle or last, there may be people who are left-hand or right-hand dominant etc.  So, understanding what’s driving them individually is paramount to creating a great team, not just concentrating on what is driving the final objectives of the team (winning the race).

Therefore, working out how you can incorporate the wider experiences skills and viewpoints into your change will ensure that you are much more likely to get the results that you’re looking for.

So, I’m going to ask you a question.

Are you going to spend some time looking at the people inside the organisation, involved in the changes you are trying to deliver? Will you consider their needs, their thoughts, ideas and their biases?  Or, are you just going to continue to work in an unemotional logical way and then wonder why you are not getting the results you were looking for?