I work with businesses, individuals and companies on how they can make a noticeable difference, not only to their own performance and profitability but to the more fulfilling task of ensuring that all employees, associates, contractors, suppliers and staff members feel valued.
I have seen that we must differentiate between the perceptions we all have and the stories we constantly tell ourselves. Recently I was engaged by a company to assess the overall satisfaction of all those connected with the company as there were some very obvious discrepancies between the performance of the people in the hierarchy and the performance of the employees and team members. It was apparent that blame and responsibility were the two key drivers in play and needed to be addressed on many levels.
The employees and team members appeared to be under-performing and the executive leader seemed to be over performing. By that I mean he was in my opinion, needlessly doing work which others could have easily done, thereby freeing him up to do other things.
At the heart of the matter was that the team members were assuming that the executives were taking them for granted whereas the executive team were very happy with the staff performance. The problem was that this information had not been relayed to the staff and team members who had “told themselves the story that they were being ignored and were unappreciated.”
After some probing questions and insightful answers it was revealed that actually all people were happy in all respects except this information had not been relayed to those people in question. When we can distinguish the primary two questions from each other that is “what am I assuming is the case here?” and “what actually is the case here?” things become clearer.
In issues like this it is wise to re-frame the question and to take responsibility for everything that has transpired and to ask any questions which you believe will make you feel totally right and clear about the situation.
This applies to relationships as well and it is usually found that we know the questions to be asked; just often we are unnecessarily afraid of the answer; remember that ostrich?
Cheers
Chris Borrett
Image Credit: FreeImages.com/BlurNash
If by chance, you have not encountered my previous posts outside this blog, one of my favourites is about “A Woman’s Labour of Love”. You have the luxury of reading it by clicking here.