Highly Effective People and Organizations

Why don’t highly effective people always run successful organizations? And why aren’t all successful organizations run by highly effective people?

We have all seen successful organizations being run by people who don’t come close to being highly effective, whilst people we know to be highly effective sometimes work in unremarkable, underperforming companies.

What is going on then?

The answer lies not in re-examining the laws that govern personal effectiveness but in reviewing the similarities and intrinsic differences between highly effective people and organizations. So where do we start?

We know that highly effective people:

o     Control all decision-making from one place – their brain;

o     Coordinate thought and action centrally in their brain and can make their mouth, hands, feet and everything in between do what they want when they want;

o     Have a single mouthpiece; and

o     Are driven by a single social paradigm – the character ethic.

Organizations, on the other hand:

o     Have multiple decision-making points and use multiple decision-making criteria:

o     Cannot centrally control every aspect of their operation;

o     Struggle to send uncorrupted messages from the center outwards and are often unable to receive incoming messages from distant parts of the organization at all;

o     Are driven by a variety of conflicting influences;

o     May try and influence behavior through corporate values without defining and weighting underlying motivations, failing to make them either relevant or meaningful to anyone apart from the team that created them;

o     Are unlikely to be able to manage relationships in a consistent manner without making a determined effort to do so; and

o     May have a leadership team covertly hostile to each other’s motivations, beliefs, individual social paradigms and ideas about corporate culture.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Defining Behavior

Behavior is what people do. It is any measurable or observable movement, task, or activity of a human being, whether this is covert or overt. This definition includes a wide variety of human activities, among which should be a sufficiently broad range of behaviors to suit practitioners from just about every theoretical orientation.

Thus behavior includes those activities which are readily observable to an outside observer. But it also includes the range of covert activities, such as thoughts, which many people have not thought of as behaviors. Thus it enwraps measurability and countability.

To be considered a behavior, an activity must be observable and countable by someone. Covert behaviors are also measurable and countable, especially by the individual himself or herself.

It might be somewhat more desirable to have as a target for intervention behaviors that are observable by others, since this potentially would allow for more reliable measurement. As long as they can be measured or observed somehow, any behavior can be considered a potential focal point for intervention.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight