Jean Roberts

This connection is vital in ensuring organisational effectiveness and individual job satisfaction.

In designing strategies to achieve organisational success, the organisation’s stated values – and those of individuals within the organisation - are a great starting point.

Organisational values can be a strong motivator for people at governance, management and operational levels of activity – but only if the people understand them:  for example, a common value should be ‘honesty in all dealings’:  however, if this value appears in documents without explanation or definition, people have no option other than to use their personal values to give these words meaning and intent.  Should any person’s interpretation miss the organisation’s hidden meaning and intent, it is likely that their words, attitudes or behaviour will be treated as out-of-place, irresponsible, disrespectful, inappropriate – or even dishonest.

Each organisational value needs to be clearly stated, clearly defined, and followed with examples of acceptable – and unacceptable – words, attitudes and behaviours.

My definition of Business Brainpower – as in my 1997 book, The Left and Right-Brain Business:

The ability to:

• accept that people can think and act differently to you,
• understand why they do, and
• apply this knowledge and understanding in managing problems, creating opportunities and accepting challenges.

My tried and tested Business Brainpower tool is left- and right-brain orientation, as it offers a means of increasing each person’s self-confidence and self-esteem – as well as team, unit and organisational effectiveness.

The ability to understand and predict human behaviours is an important factor in any organisation.    As explained and expanded in my book, there are 3 major components of a task:

1. the task component – the activity to be undertaken and the outcome to be achieved,
2. the people component – those who will be involved with or affected by the task, and
3. the environment component – the situation or circumstances within which the task is to be undertaken, accomplished or achieved; and the people are to be involved or affected.

A left-brain dominant person tends to give the task component priority over the person and environment components; a right-brain dominant person tends to give the person component priority over the task and environment components; and a centre person (who has equal value and importance for both the task and person components) tends to give the environment component priority over the task and person components.

An example of the effect of imposed organisational values

A group of regional managers were charged with the responsibility of achieving sales targets 100% above those of the equivalent period in the previous year.   On this occasion, they met to examine the performance of their respective sales teams.  Of particular interest – and concern – was the fact that some salespeople were better than others at achieving and even surpassing the imposed sales targets.

Because the organisational value and focus on the ‘task component’ was absolute, each regional manager adopted this focus in motivating, managing and monitoring individual sales targets.   They monitored individual sales figures daily, and ignored both the person and environment components.

As Business Brainpower was introduced and discussion moved to include the importance and relevance of the person and environment components, the regional managers quickly realised that some of their salespeople were experiencing difficulty in their marriages and personal relationships, others were over-committed financially and yet others were experiencing personality clashes with colleagues.   The best sales person (by sales figures of course: how else do you measure sales performance!) had an impressive and consistent record in achieving high-volume sales and doing exceptionally well for himself, his team and his regional manager.   However, he had just inherited a substantial sum of money which was sufficient to remove his need to earn a high income – and could well remove or lessen his  motivation to maintain the position of top salesperson.

This regional manager was experiencing severe stress. His best salesperson could now either ease back on his excellent sales performance or retire to lead a life of relative ease and luxury. Neither possibility thrilled this regional manager, as either action would put pressure on his own performance and the performance of the rest of his sales team.

Because of the imposed organisational value of the task component, the components of person and environment were not only devalued: they were not even considered as relevant.  All regional managers felt they had no option but to adopt or replicate this left-brain style of managing.  Regional managers whose natural priority was with the person or environment components had forced their personal values into the background in order to fit the company mould. This imposed organisational value created a stressful work environment for the regional manager every day.

By understanding and accepting Business Brainpower, the regional managers were able to objectively assess the organisational value and its effect on themselves, their team and their work environment.

Their stress levels were immediately reduced, even though the situation remained the same. They were now able to separate the task, person and environment components of each situation or problem, including the motivation of their salespeople. The regional manager who had feared losing his top salesperson was now able to introduce Business Brainpower to his sales team, which soon lifted the team’s overall performance by increasing each person’s sales figures.   The regional manager even motivated his top salesperson to choose to stay.

I might add that in the first instance the regional managers had to be convinced that expanding the focus to include the person and environment components would be useful.

Organisational effectiveness

The concept of organisational effectiveness is defined here as the effective and efficient use and application of available resources to achieve immediate and short-term objectives in line with defined quality  standards.

This definition applies to any context – including commercial, government, nonprofit and academia.

The ultimate test of organisational effectiveness includes repeat customers or clients; staff retention and satisfaction; growth in activity, impact and reach; financial viability and sustainability; ‘corporate’ citizenship; and assured value to the ‘owners’ who may be owner/managers, shareholders, association or company members, or the taxpayer.