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One of the biggest risks of being in the leadership position in a big organisation is that no one is going to tell you the truth in an open and honest way. A few leaders are lucky or wise enough to bring in outside consultants to perform this task. Most hire consultants who tell them their baby is beautiful, because that’s the type of information that gets you invited back.

Behaviours are crucial to the success of any business or team. It’s impossible to be successful without your employees demonstrating the ability to manage their time, work as a team, develop creative solutions and so on. By managing behaviours you can improve those elements of your employees’ performance that are so important to business success.

“I need more time to think about my business,” “My time is at a premium, and I don’t have time to plan properly,” “I’d like to grow my business, but I can’t find the time.” Are these familiar complaints? How can you overcome the time challenges you currently face to create the business you have always wanted? Here are some simple strategies you can use to help yourself reach the next stage, despite the demands on your time.

As a leader, it’s your job to spot what’s going right. To do that, you must habitually make it your business to find out. So what should you do if something has gone right? Start by finding out precisely what the person did that resulted in a good outcome

Groupthink, a term invented in 1972, is a mode of thinking we engage in when we are deeply involved in a cohesive, task-centred group, when our need for agreement supersedes our need for a decision based on rational information. Groupthink can lead to bad judgments and potentially disastrous decisions, and can also cause us as a group of decision makers to rationalise poor decisions after the fact. It’s a simple and totally inadequate way to deal with difficult issues.

Do you and your colleagues have an ‘us’ and a ‘them’? Are you familiar with comments like: “nobody tells me anything”, or “they move the goalposts all the time”? Who are these people, and why and in what ways are they different from you? Who is ‘they’ in your organisation? ‘Sales’? ‘Marketing’? ‘the staff’?, ‘customers’? Do ‘they’ seem to be making your job harder to do?

Look at job descriptions in almost any organisation, and you’ll find they’re broad statements of areas of responsibility or maybe lists of activities. Job descriptions like this are concerned with activity rather than output, and fuel the culture of ‘hard work’ and long hours. What you don’t see is a short, complete list of the results you are accountable for producing.

In an economic squeeze, businesses naturally focus on driving revenue and reducing costs. But there’s plenty of evidence to demonstrate a strong link between high performance and a positive working environment. According to a major study published in 2001, not only is there a link between employee attitudes and profitability – improvements in employee satisfaction ‘cause a demonstrable, measurable improvement in financial performance’.

Do you believe your business will ride out this tricky economic climate doing the same as usual? Probably not. Perhaps you’ve already decided to ‘batten down the hatches’, cut budgets and let people go. But is that really the way to ride out the difficult times and ensure your business continues to be successful? No matter what the climate, people will still buy what they want and need. The real battleground will be the value people feel they are getting. And the winners will be companies who take the opportunity to build a really strong organisation.

Your organisation’s culture needs to change along with any strategic changes – but often it gets left behind, resulting in a ‘disconnect’ between the two. The purpose of your business culture should be to support the delivery of the strategic objectives, but it can’t do that if it’s not in line.