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.

 

The Most Important Personal Asset

Obviously the real answer is common sense. But if you don’t have it already, you probably never will, and there’s nothing I can say here that’s going to change that.

Common sense aside, then, the most important asset in business is a sense of humor, an ability to laugh at yourself or the situation.

Laughter is the most potent, constructive force for diffusing business tension, and you want to be the one who controls it. If you can point out what is humorous or absurd about a situation or confrontation, can diffuse the tension by getting the other party to share your feeling, you will be guaranteed the upper hand. There are very few absolutes in business. This is one of them, and it will never fail.

A sense of humor creates one of the most favorable long-term impressions. A single humorous, self-effacing comment can immediately let someone know that you don’t take yourself too seriously, and that is the sort of thing that people remember.

It is also the best way to start a meeting. You don’t need to have them rolling in the aisles, but a mildly pleasant remark at the outset will create the right atmosphere for everything that follows. Humor is what brings back perspective, which, next to profits, is the easiest thing to lose in business.

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.