This week I had the opportunity to present the Executive Leadership Systems (ELS) process for Organizational Development to seven Tucson business owners. While doing so, I shared my belief that “What’s missing?” is the single most important question a business owner could possibly ask his or her self. I deeply believe this to be true. This question and the owners’ answers to it are an organizations’ most significant recurring catalyst for meaningful change. With commitment and focus by the owner and the employees, that question and the answers to it are the basis for developing and implementing actionable plans for improving organizational performance. The process works every time.
One of the business owners
Bob McLaughlin, responded middle east mobile number list profoundly, “Most people would benefit from asking that question in every aspect of their lives.” It struck me that he was absolutely right. In this blog, we’ll look at how we can use an awareness of “What’s missing” to make meaningful change in every aspect of our lives. We’ll look at how learning to ask that question routinely can create a positive condition of continuous self-improvement as successfully as it supports continuous process improvement in organizations.
Systems Exist Everywhere In Your Life
My presentation to the business owners centered on the idea that all organizations are comprised of systems of interrelated parts functioning within process. Left alone, all systems are subject to deterioration; neglect is a vicious corrosive. Processes always seems to fly apart when left unattended. Even while we neglect our organizational systems and are pained by impaired process, we seem to appreciate that there is value and even power in catching ourselves occasionally and asking “What’s missing?” In fact, if we are at all effective in our organizational roles, any neglect on our parts is eventually over-ridden by an intuitive sense that something is missing; something is different from a better time in the past. Then we get to work.
You can decorate absence however you want – but you are still gonna feel what’s missing.” – Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference
The reality is that virtually everything we are involved in, in every other aspect of our lives outside of our work, reflects some level of systems dynamics. The implications of neglect are no different in our personal systems. Left alone, systems deteriorate. This includes every relationship we have, even our relationship with ourselves. It truly behooves each of us to regularly ask ourselves “What’s missing?” in that relationship.
If you think something is missing in your life
it is probably you.” – Robert Holden
Legitimate inquiry, asking and answering questions, requires real honesty. There is sometimes nothing harder than being really honest with yourself, about yourself. It requires practice and discipline; it requires a thickening of one’s own skin until one is actual comfortable in that skin. The building of healthy calloused should be undertaken with a little abrasion at a time. Don’t rub any harder on yourself than you need to, but never hesitate to rub. Asking “What’s missing?” from our lives is a lot easier to take than the self-abuse of the question, “What the hell is wrong with me?” And you know, the answer and the solution set will be the same.
Look for the Pea under Your Mattress
One of the things I have notice in assessing organizational dysfunction is that the “pea” under the mattress can keep us up all night long. While we trudge along at work and in life convincing ourselves that things are good enough, nothing big seems to be going wrong, the little things – our peas under our mattresses – are keeping us up destroying our well-being and growing into the big problems in our futures. Stop and search out your peas.