Reading The Behavioural Balance Sheet
The Challenge for Managers in 2005
The starting point for this article is that it's not lack of talent, technology, experience or expertise which prevents organisations from achieving their goals - it's behaviours.
Behaviours cause most of the frustration, duplication and waste which everyone you ask can point to, but no seems to be able to do anything about. In the face of this apparent powerlessness people become disenchanted and frustrated, moaning increases, morale falls and the performance of the organisation dips.
But, it doesn't HAVE to be this way. In today's fluid business world change is inevitable, and managers, being managers, their first reaction is to want to control that change. Tom Peters writing in "Management Development Review" in 1991 contended that the Naskapi Indians have a perfectly useful strategy for managing change which was build on the premise that the "gods" determine success, and that success is a matter of chance. He writes:
"The magic of the market economy is its incomprehensibility. We do not understand it. Yet it works."
His suggestion is for us to stop pretending that we have more control than we actually have over events which shape our fate and the fate of the organisations we work for and instead of trying to understand and control it learn to work with it to achieve the best results we can.
This suggests that instead of spending our two primary resources of time and energy on trying to devise techniques for understanding change, and programmes for managing it, so that we get the "right" results, we ought to spend those two finite resources on getting the "best" results we can, and being content with that.
The problem this causes is that it is our instinct to want to know, to understand, and we have devised many and ingenious ways of enabling ourselves to do so - at least to our own satisfaction. However, for every opinion there is a counter opinion, and we all know that there are lies, damn lies and statistics. So the quest for what is "right" can occupy us to the point where we can delude ourselves that talking about what to do rather than doing anything about anything is the purpose of work.
Making the "best" of what we have requires a different philosophy and a different set of skills which are orientated to using what we have to our fullest advantage.
The chief of these is to equip managers with the skills to be able to read the behavioural balance sheet in an organisation and, by doing so, optimise the performance of its people irrespective of changes in its environment, strategy and goals.
In 1994 David Clutterbuck recognised this when he wrote:
"HR's role needs to expand beyond recruiting and training people, to motivating and "empowering " them, helping to release creativity, commitment within the context of broad corporate goals."
