Challenges of Cultural Transformation

The First Challenge - Raise Awareness

Awareness is the foundation of all of our results and determines how well individuals or teams perform in any given set of circumstances.

When people begin to think about raising levels of company performance, they often turn first to developing skills or knowledge. This is perhaps to be expected, given the emphasis placed on these areas by our education system. However, as suggested by Abraham Maslow, the well-known psychologist, when he said, “What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself,” the only means by which to raise performance is actually to raise the self-awareness of the individuals concerned.

It follows from Maslow’s statement that people perform at the level that they do because they are not aware what they need to do in order to improve. Yet it is possible to look at anyone and identify areas in their professional and personal lives where they know how to do better than they are actually doing. For example, every student knows how to study more effectively, every salesman knows how to sell more, and everyone who wants to be slimmer knows what they must do to be successful. So why don’t they do it? What is it that holds us back from putting into practice what we know at a conscious level?

The explanation of this apparent contradiction lies in the fact that it is not conscious knowledge that drives the choices people make. Instead, our actions are the consequences of all of the habits and beliefs that reside at the subconscious level. If improved performance could be achieved simply by gaining knowledge, there would be a higher correlation between education and performance, and people would benefit more from training courses.

Because many organisations do not understand this, development efforts are often targeted ineffectively. For example, trainers are often engaged in response to poor sales with a remit to improve sales skills or processes. Unfortunately, this will rarely have much effect because most of their audience will usually know how to sell. Their challenge is to do more of what they already know.

Rather than more sales training, what sales teams in this situation need in the first instance is:

  • Greater awareness of why they are not doing what they know
  • An understanding of how to use that awareness to do things differently

With that platform, regular skills-training becomes much more valuable because people have the ability to put their new learning into practice. If you are spending money on teaching your staff new skills but have not first given them the awareness necessary to be able to put the training into practice, then you may be wasting both time and money.

 

Raising awareness
Stimulating new thoughts and behaviours
Developing a learning environment
Growing your leaders