Three traps for organizations – and one way out

How many organizations can say about themselves that they really know themselves? That they really know and understand their personalities, strengths, values and preferences?

Numerous organizations don’t really know themselves. This has become clear to us in talking to many HR managers. This is primarily because employees don’t know themselves well enough. And if individuals don’t get to know each other, no real self-awareness process is possible at the team and organizational level either.

We call these organizations sleeping organizations.

A number of problems arise for organizations from this state of not knowing themselves:

• Goal-oriented actions, e.g., well-founded development of employees or meaningful and sustainable changes in structures and processes are hardly possible.
• And when action is taken, it is often based on ignorance. Or, what is often even worse, they are based on assumptions based on individual perception filters of people in positions of responsibility.

Intermediate conclusion: organizations that do not know each other can run into difficulties in deploying employees properly, developing them and realizing their full human potential, letting them flourish. This affects productivity, speed, leads to a permanent reduction in well-being, and ultimately costs a lot of money.

But there is a way out!

For this we define two basic influencing factors, which are crucial for success in such a situation:

1. Self-awareness means self-perception, being aware of one’s self, self-knowledge. For the organizational context, this means that each individual should know himself or herself. Based on this, teams and organizations can get to know each other. It is too short-sighted to encourage only the leaders to do this.
2. Mindful actions means: actions and changes aimed at improving “life” in organizations, e. g. through new assignment of tasks and responsibilities, through new employees, changed teams or personnel decisions.