Using Business Psychology to Improve Your Business' Performance

In today's modern, competitive business environment, CEOs and managers have to build teams that are faster on their feet than ever before.  Culture change and teambuilding, motivation, leadership and personal performance strategy are all promoted as the keys for the organisation of the future. 

In the future, successful organisations will “up their game” by enabling their people improve their mental powers by learning more effective habits and by improving their negotiating ability through a better understanding of their, and others’, emotions.

Many of the self-help books and commercial training programmes aimed at improving personal and corporate performance are based on applied psychology.  However, there is often little or no academic rigour behind the psychology.  There is a substantial consultancy and training industry growing rapidly in the UK with more and more tools based on applied psychology.  But which of these are best for you and your organisation?

Transactional Analysis (TP) – is based on the principle that each of us should like ourselves and that we accept that everyone else has a right to be here.  Originally developed by Eric Berne in the 1954, this tool became popular in the 1980’s, particularly with the public sector, but has since gone out of fashion in recent times.  In its favour, Transactional Analysis is good for fixing poor relationships in the workplace and for getting to grips with dysfunctional teams.  The tool is relatively easy to grasp.  On the other hand, Transactional Analysis is sometimes thought of as simplistic and unthinking resulting in people using the tool’s jargon and catchphrases glibly and without thinking about their meaning.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) – practitioners believe that all people have hidden behaviours that help us to operate in our daily lives.  We can change ourselves, even those aspects that we think are fixed, by analysing these hidden behaviour patterns, from how fast we learn to how we respond to criticism.  The analysis looks at people who are regarded as being very effective to build highly detailed “models” of behaviours and internal coping strategies that can be transferred to others.  The analysis looks at both verbal and non-verbal communications, how people process information and the kinds of reality maps that people draw.  By changing the maps, you can make significant changes in performance results.  The tool offers some ingenious ideas such as eye movements betray whether you think and work better in pictures or words – enabling people to change the way in which they might communicate better with you.  Richard Bandler and developed John Grinder developed the theory in California in the mid-1970s from ideas in Gestalt therapy and linguistics.  Its strengths include the use of principles from several schools of psychology and its claim to achieve success more quickly than other more traditional tools.  Against the tool is the academics’ claim the tool is not based on science.  NLP is one of today’s “must-haves” for business performance improvement.

Solutions Focus (SF) – why waste time focussing on problems and analysing how they arose?  The Solutions Focus theory starts by homing in on finding a solution to a problem by adapting the things that they do very well in other activities.  For example, where people provide good customer service, what activities, behaviours and attitudes can be adopted, adapted and expanded to help improve manufacturing processes.  The theory uses the “Miracle Question” to ask if, while sleeping, you came up with a miraculous solution to a problem, what signs would you notice that told you the miracle had happened?  Steve de Shayzer, a family therapist in the US, devised the approach in the late 1980’s in an attempt to find a way of moving quickly finding solutions.  The tool is simple in theory and produces quick, cheap solutions.  The downsides of the approach are that it needs skilled practitioners for delivery and, because no two cases are the same, it has to start from scratch every time it is used.  This tool is increasing in popularity as a performance management and strategic planning aid.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) – this tool can best be summed up as “look for the best in people and organisations”.  Practitioners of this approach believe that, when you are looking into “problems” you are always going to find problems but, if an organisation tries to learns to appreciate what it is good at, it will discover more that is good.  The approach uses questions such as “when we do customer care well and why?” or “what attitudes and processes are at the heart of our good examples?”  Established in the 1980s, the method is popular in the USA but growing slowly in the UK.  AI works well for both large and small teams and organisations through its inspirational approach.  The approach attracts some criticism for its “holistic” and “new-age” philosophy.

Gestalt - Based initially on the insights of Gestalt psychology and traditional psychotherapy, Gestalt was developed in the 1940s by Fritz Perls, as a psycho-therapeutic model based on the promotion of "awareness".  Team members are encouraged to become aware of their own feelings and behaviours and the effect that people have on their environment.  By understanding and improving their awareness of what is happening now, people will be provoked into a natural shift in thinking that will bring a wider-scale change for the organisation.  The benefits of this tool are its power and capacity for producing great insights. However, many of its underlying ideas are complex and it is sometimes difficult to see evidence of its results.

If you are interested in finding out more about using business psychology to improve your business performance  contact Ralph Leishman@4-consulting.com

Ros is a co-founder of 4-consulting, click here to view his profile.