Each human being is wired a little differently.  We are made up of preferences, levels of comfort, skills, strengths, weaknesses, ways of listening and hearing, ways of speaking, and our own ways of doing things. When people discover and learn to leverage their strengths and work in ways that support their preferences, they discover new levels of effectiveness and efficiency. We call this Natural Effectiveness™. 
 
When fully understood and properly leveraged, your Natural Effectiveness is a powerful tool in achieving personal success.  When placed in the service of the strategic initiatives of an organization, Natural Effectiveness optimizes all that an employee brings to the table. This facilitates not only personal success, but also team and enterprise success.  Understanding how teams and departments work together most efficiently, how they communicate with one another most effectively and how they can leverage the strengths each individual brings to the group, results in amazing success. 
 
 
When people understand the motivators of their own actions - their own behavior - and that of others, everything they do can become more efficient and effective:

• Less time is wasted on untangling miscommunications
• No time is wasted on hurt feelings or bruised egos because of the way something is said or an issue is addressed
• People know how to create the environments in which they are able to perform tasks most effectively and efficiently
• People understand the factors and forces that can impede their ability to think about data and solve problems
• People learn how to best interact with others on a team and the most efficient distribution of work within the team

  
Many of even the most enlightened organizations have not yet embraced development of a naturally effective organization.  For too many years, organizations have set out to help people improve upon their weaknesses and correct their inadequacies. 
 
 
Studies have shown, however, that far more is to be gained from helping people learn to work from and capitalize on their strengths than from trying to improve upon weaknesses.  Some organizations develop processes and procedures believed to accomplish goals or complete tasks efficiently. This approach breaks down when they fail to determine whether the process or procedure is efficient for the individual assigned the task or trying to accomplish the goal.  Some managers have, in fact, become so enamored of the process that they cannot see that someone else might have a more efficient process to accomplish the same task. 
 
 
It is easy to forget that different people have different skill sets, that there might be a better way to do something than "our way", and that if something we say is clearly understood by one person, it might not also be understood by everyone else. In fact, the very manager who can see that a teaching style is not helping her child learn and race to the school to discuss alternatives with the teacher and the principal might not be able to recognize the same dissonance in her office.
 
 
Sometimes organizations manage - often by accident - to place talented and capable individuals in the perfect work environment and they thrive.  Sometimes, also by accident, organizations place equally talented and capable individuals in the same work environment only to see them become frustrated, increasingly uncomfortable and increasingly unproductive and disengaged.  The difference is how the individual functions (or doesn't) in a particular environment. 

• Are you asking someone to lead in a way that is unnatural for them?
• Are you asking an extreme introvert who wants nothing more than to be able to sit in a cubicle and perform assigned tasks to lead a team?
• Are you situating a steady, consistently paced individual in a fast-paced environment marked by unexpected developments that feels like chaos?
• Are you providing too much structure, or too little?

Many organizations are now beginning to ask different questions. As markets change and customer expectations demand rapid adjustment, many enterprises can no longer afford to build their workforces entirely of people who think and work the same way.  Marketplace agility often depends on internal flexibility and diversity.  Allowing people to work - in fact, enabling them to work - at their naturally effective best could be the organization's secret weapon in responding quickly to shifts in their primary markets.
 
 
 
When an organization can help its people understand and learn to work from their natural effectiveness zones in ways that accentuate their individual strengths, each person will achieve more and do it more efficiently.  When each person and each team in the organization are working at their naturally effective best, organizational velocity begins to build that quickly becomes strategy acceleration toward successful achievement of the shared vision of a successful future.

Copyright 2009 by Gayla Hodges