At BRS we are passionate about Human Synergistics. It is a life changing model and we have a strong belief that organisations who live the constructive styles will achieve long term sustainability better than those who don’t. Having a constructive culture doesn’t guarantee success but in our view it does improve your changes.
When I coach leadership teams people often seek to understand on a more practical level as to what this means. In simple the four constructive styles focus on:
- Affiliative – Setting your team, peers and others up for success – This means being up front and honest, being clear on expectations (two way), being clear on roles and responsibilities (role clarity), and being clear on what success looks like. Affiliative is not about being friendly, and it’s around a genuine concern for the relationship and wanting to see others succeed.
- Humanistic Encouraging – Trusting in others – This means empowering others, but also holding people to account. You can’t have empowerment without accountability (this is just delegation and shows a lack of trust). Humanistic encouraging is not about protecting your staff per se as this shows a lack of trust. Humanistic encouraging is about trusting in others to do their job, giving the autonomy, holding them accountable but then then giving them help where required.
- Self Actualisation – Focus on the customer – This means challenging what we do and why, and whether it adds value. The self-actualisation mindset is about making a difference and focusing on what it means for our customers or end users. It’s no co-incidence that when I work with teams that those who are close to the customer are the ones who have the highest results on the self-actualised scale.
- Achievement – Deliver great results and continuously improve – This means understanding our key result areas, understanding our key performance indicators, being transparent on results and focusing on constant improvement in trends. Achievement is not about perfection or achieving for the sake of it. This about focusing on the things that matter most and putting energy into things that make a difference rather than energy into things that keep us safe.
When leaders are clear to their teams on roles and expectations, when they empower and hold people to account but also provide help where required, where they focus and commit to the customer, and when they measure and drive trend improvement in the key result areas of the business then they will achieve success. Those who focus on pleasing others, playing it safe, playing politics, maintaining control, needing to win, or needing things to be perfect may survive in political low performing environments but as soon as they work in transparent high performing environments they will fail.
