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The Hidden Advantage - Powerful keys to significantly improving business performance

Guest post by: David Powell

Article Overview: This article offers leaders and managers the possibility of achieving significantly improved business performance from relatively minor outlays by applying innovative concepts and powerful, proven tools and approaches to maximise their current investment in their people.

The Hidden Advantage - Powerful keys to significantly improving business performance

Do you have business performance improvement challenges? Your 'gold medal' performances of yesterday will not guarantee you business success tomorrow. Your competitors are always striving to improve and beat you. But even more so than the Olympic Games, the game of business is usually a win/lose contest. The winner takes the 'gold medal' and wins the customer's business. Everyone else is awarded a 'lead medal' - heavy and worthless. No result and no business - just the opportunity to de-brief the loss and improve your people's performance for the next contest. So how do you challenge your employees and management to achieve more?

What are you doing differently? They say the definition of futility is to keep doing what you are doing and expect things to magically improve. What are you planning to do differently to get more from your people and ensure their 'gold medal' winning performance tomorrow?

The hidden advantage - the power of the whole person Unleashing the power of the whole person - the power of the body, mind, emotions and spirit can provide you with that crucial hidden advantage - the 'something different' approach to radically improve your organisation's performance. By addressing and empowering the whole person, you will awaken the hidden advantage, the usually dormant and intangible spirit within your people - that can define a brand, empower a company and help your people rise above the competition. The question is - how do you address, empower and inspire the whole person - body, mind, emotions and spirit when leading and managing your staff and supervisors?

16 cylinder performance As a metaphor - imagine each of your people as a 16 cylinder engine capable of sustained high performance. The body and mind each contribute 3 cylinders of 'firepower'. However the emotions and spirit, when appropriately addressed and inspired, are potentially much more powerful - each capable of contributing an additional five cylinders of 'firepower'. To consistently fire up the passion and motivation of your people's emotions and inspire the integrity, initiative, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, resilience and persistence of their spirit takes an understanding of what you need to 'touch'. If you want motivated and enthusiastic staff, you have to know how to 'touch' the core of their being, their enthusiasm - derived from the ancient Greek words - en theos - the spirit within.

Defining the spirit The word spirit derives from the Latin verb spirare, to breathe. A person's spirit brings the breath of life to their body. The en theos - the spirit within is the core of their being, the essence of who they are. By comparison, spiritual matters are entirely different and influence how a person chooses to relate to Universal Intelligence whether one calls that God, Allah, Jehovah, Brahma, Great Spirit, The One or All That Is. This is a very private world of religious beliefs, faith, Gnostic wisdom and personal experience that must be respected within the business environment.

Addressing the whole person - body, mind, emotions and spirit is however secular and practical and entirely free of religious connotations. The hidden advantage is knowing how to awaken and access the spirit intelligence, intuition, creativity and innate wisdom and tap the vast unaddressed resources that you are already paying for in your people. You need to wire the appropriate whole person empowerment tools and approaches into the DNA of your organisational culture. To achieve the most from your salaries, wages and training expenditure, you have to fire up all 16 cylinders in all your people, otherwise by definition - your HR investment is sub-optimal.

Most senior managers estimate the number of cylinders currently firing in their organisation is about 50% at best. This is like Dire Straits - it's money for nothing. All you need to do is fire up what you are already paying for.

A note of caution - the challenge of metaphysics Although the body is physical (you can touch it), the mind, emotions and spirit exist in the unseen and little understood realms of invisible metaphysics. Our education - primary, secondary and tertiary gives most people little help or explanation in understanding the operating principles of these metaphysical realms or guidelines on how to empower the spirit or harness the full power of the mind or emotions. At work this lack of understanding can be very expensive.

You can learn how to operate in these unseen but immensely powerful realms of the metaphysics using a simple, practical and easily implemented set of 16 cylinder whole person empowerment tools and approaches. To become a metaphysical engineer and re-engineer your approaches to people empowerment and communication, team building and team culture, change management, sales and consulting skills, management, leadership and motivation in your organisation you need to change the quality of your people's thought.

Intellectual mind based approaches Currently most leadership and management approaches involve mind based intellectual analysis, ideas, theories and opinions. These approaches do not recognise, understand or accommodate how the en theos - the spirit within operates in life and creates physical reality from metaphysical thought and beliefs. Our minds have evolved over the millennia as powerful problem solving devices. The mind is truly a remarkable innovation but the power of the mind is relatively small compared to the power of the intelligence, insight, intuition and wisdom available to the inspired spirit. Thus results from mind based approaches when trying to change people's behaviour and increase sustainable performance are sub-optimal and relatively ineffective.

Emotional intelligence based approaches One of the latest management tools is emotional intelligence. However an emotion occurs when a metaphysical thought impinges on the physical body. Emotions are an effect caused by thought.Think about it for yourself. Positive thoughts induce good feelings in your body. Negative thoughts create feelings of discomfort in your body. When your thoughts are worried or concerned, your body contracts and you feel that discomfort. When your thoughts are excited and uplifted by the prospect of something interesting, your body is energised and you feel good.

Thus chasing emotions and trying to demonstrate emotional intelligence is chasing effect. It is sub-optimal. Where the emotion is the effect, the quality of the thought is the root cause of this emotion. The only way to achieve stable, positive emotions is to ensure stable, positive thoughts. Thus the optimum approach to improving your people's performance is to change the quality of your people's thought.

Spirit empowerment based approaches Spirit empowerment leadership and management approaches hone the quality of people's thought and thus the related emotions they experience by recognizing and dialoguing directly with their en theos - the spirit within. A focus on changing the quality of thought in an organisation recognises the way thought is generated by the attention and intention of the spirit being. Where a person focuses their attention and thus what they think about reflects their level of interest in any area. The strength of their intention and thus the strength of their thoughts reflect their commitment to a chosen subject.

The en theos - the spirit within - is interested in seeking (attention) and engaging (intention) in meaningful and challenging games - not jobs. Nobody is looking for a job - everyone is looking for a game. Just look at the enthusiasm stirred by great sporting events such as World Cup Soccer, International rugby, Wimbledon or The Ashes - an enormous phenomenon unleashed by a game. Thus the fundamental role of any leader or manager in an organisation is to create an inspiring and challenging game that will attract, enrol, engage and motivate calibre people.

This is a key insight in accessing 16 cylinder firepower. You don't have to blindly accept this basic statement - just think about your own engagement in the world. What turns you on? A boring repetitive, meaningless task or job or an exciting vision and game plan which you can work towards realising? As spirit beings, we are game and goal focused by nature. Thus the quality of a person's thought is a function of how challenging and inspiring they find their chosen goals and game(s).

Thinking about challenging and inspiring goals and vision-focused activities within the context of a personally meaningful game is the root cause of people's emotions, commitment, motivation, enthusiasm and performance. This key principle applies equally to staff and management.

What's the game? The 16 cylinder empowerment challenge for every business leader or manager is to create an inspiring game. When people are engaged in a challenging game - such as 'let's achieve the inspiring enterprise vision by working as a high performance team', the thoughts generated by the attention and intention of the spirit being are positive and performance oriented. They will experience pleasant and fulfilling emotions as a by-product.

When the business enterprise offers no meaningful or challenging game or vision and only repetitive tasks, such as 'just get the job done' or 'management by objectives' or 'job descriptions' or 'let's make the budgeted numbers' or 'let's not upset the stock market analysts' predictions', the spirit feels bored and makes up substitute games such as 'company politics' or 'let's get the other department' or 'let's get the boss'. This is not rocket science but it has eluded most people and most business enterprises to date.

Even many relatively progressive companies do not harness or use the power of such a simple 16 cylinder empowerment game development tool as graphical vision and graphical plans anywhere in their company. It has to be graphical because the spirit prefers pictures to words. You remember someone's face, you can't remember their name. Why should it be different with leadership and management? They will remember and align to your pictures. They will never remember your words. Most organisations don't harness the basic principle that the en theos - the spirit within creates their reality by the quality, clarity and strength of their thoughts.

If you want organisational success, start by getting all your people on 16 cylinders and focus the clarity and intensity of their thoughts on the same game - 'let's work together to achieve our vision'.

Summary In summary, any leader or manager is faced with five key variables that must all be addressed to empower and sustain 16 cylinder performance in their staff.

These variables are:

• Purpose
• Passion
• Plans
• Persistence
• Paradigms (environment)

21^st century leaders and managers must:

• Give their people a clear sense of purpose using vision achievement as the game.
• Arm their people with a comprehensive set of personal and inter-personal passion tools to improve personal motivation and enhance inter-personal rapport and influencing skills.
• Provide an understanding (and appropriate tools) on how best to engage the en theos - the spirit within in focused and empowered planning.
• Provide their staff with the keys to persistence - internal and external - because every organisation will be attacked by the 'aliens of resistance'.
• And finally, provide their people with the understanding of the fundamental global paradigm changes that are currently and irrevocably changing the rules of the game of business forever.

If this brief article makes sense to you and strikes a chord, if you need to lead and manage an organisation to outstanding performance and results, the chances are you need to start doing a few things differently - now. You can rarely sustain long term competitive advantage from just your products. Achieving sustainable advantage lies in how effectively you lead and manage your people.

Tapping the hidden advantage that you are already paying for by addressing and empowering the en theos - the spirit within and firing up the 16 cylinders of each of your people will provide you with the sustainable edge that you need. The increased results will delight your stakeholders and guarantee you the 'gold medal' performance you need tomorrow.

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Article Tags: business performance improvement, business success, contribute 3, cylinder engine, definition of futility, emotions, firepower, game, gold medal performances, hidden advantage, high performance, intangible spirit, metaphor, olympic games, performance tomorrow, success tomorrow



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