Unfortunately for some businesses, competition can also come from within, as employees behave as if they belong to another team. What’s a manager meant to do with these individuals?
Last month we talked about your organisation’s cultural agenda for 2012. Growing and evolving your organisational culture in the right direction is everyone’s role and responsibility. This coupled with a common purpose and goals are imperative in order to mobilise and synchronise your workforce. So why do find we have employees who behave like they are part of the competition? Why do we have pockets of them within our organisation deliberately behaving like they are playing on a different team to the rest of us within the organisation?
I always thought the competition was on the outside of our organisation and not on the inside, but unfortunately that is not the case in some organisations. So why do some employees take pleasure in game-playing, undermining projects and basically compete head-to-head to make our life difficult? The answer resides somewhere between lack of skills/competence and megalomania or ‘tin god’ personas. The lack of talent of these individuals creates behavioural patterns that creates a diversion and deflects attention onto other people and areas.
I recently read an interesting book called ‘Infinite Talent’ written by Rob Clarke, CEO LearnX Foundation. Rob differentiates between finite and infinite talent. Infinite talent he describes as ‘a spontaneous, genuine experience and is a person’s purest expression of who he or she ultimately is’. This talent is within you; what you observe, how you act and interact.
People who have infinite talent are able to achieve extraordinary things. They have a number of qualities in common; namely:
- Curiosity – seek to understand, then to be understood
- Test knowledge through their experience/s
- Change agent – a catalyst and driver of change
- Take ownership
- Deal with ambiguity
- Be part of the solution
Applying these qualities in your work and personal life enhances your mental agility, positive attitude and ‘can do’ mindset. It enables you to be an authentic cog in the solution wheel. Your mental mindset is what makes you an infinite talent.
Be part of the solution and not the problem in your organisation. Live everyday with a can do attitude. So, the next time someone shares with you all the reasons why something can’t be done, try and turn their thinking around so they share with you ideas on how it can be done. Remember success comes in cans and not can nots.
I will leave you with a quote that resonated with me from Rob’s book and it is from President Barack Obama…’Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek’.
So what can you do to engender a new culture of thinking and behaving in your organisation in 2012?
