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Your working environment has a powerful influence on the success of your business. If you create a positive, friendly, supportive and inspiring work experience, you and your team will achieve more and your business will thrive. Working in a cluttered, disorganised environment, on the other hand, handling irritations and unwelcome interruptions, can drain your energy and deprive you of the enthusiasm and focus you need to operate successfully. The stress that results from this can lead to anger, frustration and resentment in your attitude to work. When your working life is starting to feel like an unwelcome, overbearing responsibility, it’s time to act.

When we talk about Organisational Behaviour, we’re thinking about a wide range of topics, such as human behaviour, change, leadership and teams. Organisational Behaviour is the study and application of knowledge about how people, individuals, and groups act in organisations. It interprets people and organisation relationships in terms of the whole person, whole group, whole organisation, and whole social system. Its purpose is to build better relationships by achieving human objectives, organisational objectives, and social objectives.

As a leader, have you thought about how you might empower those around you? Here are some pointers:

Have a vision broad and deep enough to inspire others and allow them to take parts of it and make it their own.
Help the group develop a strategy—a plan for getting from here to there, with milestones and goals along the way.
Use Command mode sparely. Most of the time, lead by example and persuasion.

Streamlining your business is an act of true growth and resilience building. The aim is to create a peaceful, welcoming working environment conducive to clarity, creativity and providing a genuinely meaningful service to others.

From the myriad models of leadership, we offer our own three-dimensional approach as a valuable perspective from which to think about, reflect on, and implement leadership. Leadership, we believe, can be explored usefully through three aspects: strategy, performance and culture.

You may not think of your business as a ‘brand’ – indeed, you may be thinking it’s not the right term for a serious business which is going places. However, there’s a lot to be said for leadership which develops its own ‘brand.’ It sets your business apart from the competition and gives it a particular personality, independent of its founder. It may help create an asset to sell one day, empower others and help them grow, and give you the pride and satisfaction of having created an entity with a life all its own.

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.

There’s a second stage when your business moves out of the ‘consolidation’ phase. This is when the focus of the leadership group needs to move away completely from day to day operations: they need to become Directors, with their focus on strategic, financial and legal issues – and the second tier of management needs to take over the day-to-day running of the organisation.

It’s easy to let your business grow and develop without having to think too much about the direction it’s taking. But at some point it’s going to become an entity in itself – a ‘proper’ organisation, with a life of its own – and you need to start thinking about giving it some positive direction.