The Picture in this article shows what happens in nature when humans leave cities. Well, business is no different than nature.
Negativity takes over just like nature takes over when humans leave. In the case of businesses, people are disengaged. When staff are unhappy, they are in the office, but their attention is elsewhere. They much rather be somewhere else.
Too often staff are told they must change and sent on skills training rather than training them on how to be happy. Why not look at ways on how to encourage people to motivate themselves? Make it easy for people to understand their own creativity and how if they are creative it contributes to the culture of the company.
Being creative does not mean that everybody can do their own thing, in their own way. It means tuning into your own needs and how that reflects the needs of your team and the company. When people decide they want to change, want to work with the people around them, companies have infinite possibilities.
Teaching them how to be happy is teaching them how to work together without the constant communication, motivation and explanation of vision and mission. They are aware of their own needs, the needs of their team and the organization. They look for ways to add value just like a murmuration of starlings.
That is when companies create change rather than respond to change. That is when new solutions that change the world are born.
A statement like “That’s the way we do things around here” is an indicator that staff is responding to change, rather than creating the change.
When company leaders talk about change, they usually have a desired result in mind e.g. gains in performance, a better approach to the customer or a solution to a formidable challenge. They know that if they are to achieve this result, people throughout the company need to change their behaviour and practices, but that is the hardest to achieve.
How then do you create change?
When people are secure and really understand their own feelings and emotions and how that affects their environment, they can move from being competitive to being creative.
Office politics is nothing other than people who are caught up in their own biology not understanding why their body is reacting to the irritating colleague next to them or why they reacted the way they did in that stressful meeting. Their body is reacting in a set of behaviours that were created over time. No matter how hard we try we always return to our true nature. The nature created by our past interactions with people, our environment, our experiences and the emotions we experienced during these interactions.
Emotion is the characteristic that makes humans different from other species and having compassion is saying I know how that feels, how embarrassing it was, how ashamed I felt, how difficult that was, how sad it was. Having compassion means you have felt it and you recognize it in another person and you don’t have to make the other person wrong for you to be right. You work as a murmuration of starlings.
Creating space for staff to learn about their emotions will have to come from forward-thinking leaders. Leaders who understand that spending money on training for their staff to be happy is investing in their culture and breaking the habit of “That is how it is done around here”
