We All Need Encouragement
This article explores the idea that everyone needs encouragement regardless of their age, job, status, income, experience, or background. While not revolutionary, introduced is the concept of putting in place foundational beliefs, either in a business setting or one's personal life: this will resonate with people who hold character paramount in their lives, and even if not a high priority, it provides a path toward awareness and understanding.
Praise at times is helpful. Our idea is that encouragement relates to specific beliefs with accompanying choices, actions, or results of those beliefs, then worthy acknowledgment of any designed achievement (i.e. outcome) is evidence of people taking responsibility for a greater good. The ideas here show that when useful and effective beliefs are implemented centered upon the character and virtuous behaviors, support, confidence, and hope come present (i.e. the components of encouragement).
(Note) This is not about the use of financial or performance incentives to produce improved behaviors, which may only be temporary, but rather employing time-tested effective long-term education and support of the human being.
A New Basis for Understanding
This article is intended to lay the foundation for establishing a belief-based environment where individuals and teams strive to accomplish something worthy and virtuous, which requires no financial, status or positional gain to do the current and next right thing.
In other words, no outward incentive will ever be needed to have someone perform a character-based choice, action or result.
Belief-Based Actions without reward…
Being Grateful for Doing Honorable Deeds
We submit that the sole purpose of doing worthy and virtuous deeds is entirely for the individual's internal personal satisfaction and gratefulness of being able to do something honorable and good.
Being in a state of generosity, without anyone knowing of your contribution demonstrates a higher purpose…
This concept clearly speaks to a higher purpose. In fact, no one may ever know what has actually occurred if the doer of the choices, actions or results keeps the deed to themselves. This belief activity is about character building, which means for us that personal worth in a belief context is an internal activity for taking actions for doing good, which supports the individual's satisfaction and a sense of well being, regardless whether the activity is difficult or not.
“In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity”
We further explore a rationale for bringing meaningful and purposeful beliefs to small businesses to support the professional growth, development, and well-being of the primary business asset and contributor - the human being.
(Note) This article is not intended for start-ups who wish to expand rapidly, profit their investors, leaders and other stakeholders, toward growing an enterprise business: this is no judgment toward big business because they usually have the means (i.e. investor capital) to implement sophisticated learning systems. It is, however, entirely intended for small businesses whose owners have created a legacy of product or service excellence or wish to and also possess a determined motivation and desire to grow and expand for the benefit of their customers/clients, themselves, their families and their employees.
Belief as Education and Principle
The prelude above establishes that beliefs can either be internal or external, business or individual. The emphasis in "A New Basis for Understanding" paragraph above highlights the individual or person with the purposeful idea that it begins at the individual level first and foremost. Moreover, this article will focus attention on establishing an example belief where the belief will be used as a teaching device, along with being a driver for sustaining virtuous behaviors, both desired and wanted for an individual and a business - see Footnote 1.
A Concept Worth Considering & Implementing
The idea that a belief can make a difference in one's life is traditionally accepted and spans the classics to modern times. Beliefs, however, have been defined forever in recorded history, and in the present usage can have all kinds of meaning. We give stories to our beliefs to make them mean something to us, and to be understandable, then finally to be acceptable to us and sometimes others. We're not talking about truth, although truth can also have separate meanings depending upon the selected domain: law, philosophy, history, etc.
To give a real example of how powerful beliefs can be, we pull from a historically true story as told by Dr. Mario Martinez. He recalls that a priest goes into a hospital room, gives the last rights to a patient and the patient dies within minutes. The problem is the priest went into the room of a completely healthy man, who gave up the ghost, based completely on his deeply held cultural and religious beliefs. Dr. Martinez studies different cultural belief systems as it affects health, longevity, and success, so we know that this true account is just one example of his research.
Since we have been working in our own leadership practice to help create character-based and virtuous belief systems inside business and teams, we will share one example of a created belief, that can become the basis for evidence-based encouragement. As an awareness starting point and to gain a quick understanding of how individuals compared to 24 character strengths (i.e. virtuous beliefs) - see Footnote 2.
Here's an Idea...
You can define a belief, make choices for it, associate actions to the choices and have a specific result occur.
How do Beliefs work for Us?
We have all been dealing with beliefs for some period of time: yes, each of us. The current mentoring/coaching culture suggests there are many kinds, such as limiting beliefs, ineffective beliefs, false beliefs, ad nauseam. Each of us has the experience of taking on someone else's belief, whether from our culture, parents, family members, friends, school, teachers, coaches, business, etc. and have found that over time the belief either didn't serve us well or we eventually found it to be untrue or false.
We'll take a different tack here and say that we want to define beliefs that will serve an individual and a business well: beliefs in which people can step into and accept as their own without having to adjust their own principles (e.g. review the next heading below with examples of some ineffective business imposed beliefs). We think the next image is suggestive of the concept that the individual can be shackled or enslaved by and a taken-on or imposed belief.
This imagery illustrates being shackled by some other beliefs than your own and the conflict arising from this difficult experience…
Struggling with Someone Else's Imposed Beliefs
When a company professes their employees are their main assets but then expects people to work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week...
Or, companies publicize their open-door policy but make important decisions behind closed doors...
Or, the company brings in outside consultants who were previous employees to reduce costs, so they don't have to pay taxes and benefits.
Belief Power
The power of beliefs is a driving force in our lives and most often we pay little attention to them, both to our detriment and our unknowing benefit. Our position on designing beliefs is straight-forward and supportive of living an on-purpose personal and business life. We also suggest that by defining a set of beliefs, focusing our concentration upon and living inside them, other useless beliefs will fall by the wayside. Those beliefs that stop us must be dealt with: in our experience, they'll continue to surface until you understand what's occurring and eliminate the unfavorable components and aspects of them.
Let's take one xxample of a designed belief next.
Integrity
To illustrate how implementing a designed belief can be helpful, we will describe an example of the belief of integrity. First though a question. What do you think would occur if this belief was defined and implemented inside your own business? We tried it with one of our clients to determine how effective the belief could be. A number of things actually happened, not the least of which was a continuing discussion about how to consistently measure it.
Before we implemented the idea of it, we experimented by throwing a wadded piece of paper in the hallways and watched to see who would pick it up and dispose of it: more than 50% did, which we thought was a relatively good sign we could receive acceptance of this belief. Not an overly scientific approach, as a precursor to our design, yet we thought it healthy at least.
Example of Integrity as a Company Visual Display
This “Integrity Belief” was created by the leadership team for a manufacturer of custom products. The intent was to create a visual display that could be shown across the various internal business groups. The group leaders intended to point to the display in group meetings as a learning device for exploration when problems arose. One of the issues to improve upon was Returned Material Authorizations (RMA's) which for this business meant a redesign and re-manufacture to make it right for their customer: more importantly, it meant a loss of profit for most of the projects which had resulted in an RMA.
(Note) We are still gathering data since this is an on-going implementation project. In the future, we are planning on writing an article describing in detail what occurred and the associated challenges and outcomes. However, we expect similarly positive results because we have implemented this belief in our own business over the last 24 months. The net result in our business so far has been improved product/services releases, faster time-to-market because of standardized product/service designs, less copy-editing errors and adherence to release changes.
In the client's business, we noted improved inter-group communications, increased employee contributions and participation, and the development of a common language in which blame and conflict were reduced substantially. The leadership group accepted responsibility for and supported the implementation, using positive and specific language, over-articulating the reasons for integrity, and what it meant to them. There was a lifting effect of collective positive attitudes and open communications are continuing to prevail.
How Does this Relate to Encouragement?
Let's explore the definition of encouragement. From an internet inquiry, the following was returned:
noun
The action of giving someone support, confidence, or hope. "thank you for all your support and encouragement",
synonyms: heartening, cheering up, inspiration, motivation, stimulation, fortification;
Persuasion to do or to continue something. "incentives and encouragement to play sports",
The act of trying to stimulate the development of an activity, state, or belief. "the encouragement of foreign investment".
We suggest that by implementing a belief or a set of beliefs, the very essential intended consequence is direct and improved communications. We venture to guess you must realize that as humans, much of our own communications is indirect, not always on point, and filtered through our own beliefs, mood swings, and current-moment attitudes. This human characteristic tends to confuse and create misunderstandings. When a belief is defined and a visual display of a belief pointed to with frequency during problem-solving or any discussion, there exists an opportunity for education, interpretation, argument, awareness, and understanding. It also has the capacity to improve participation and contributions from team members, if the communication exercise is facilitated well.
A By-Product of Beliefs Implementation
We say that the very nature of implementing a belief will produce encouragement because the act of communicating centered around a belief will automatically create a sense of support, confidence in the participants, and a sense of hope. We have found that the sense of hope comes from the members contributing to give-and-take conversations toward solving the challenges, issues, or problems discussed.
(Wisdom Sidebar) This discussion referenced here will work better when the beliefs of teamwork, excellence, performance, accountability, and servant-practices have been defined. It further helps that each team member has taken the evaluation of strength from the VISA Institute (i.e., noted in footnote 2) to gain a basic understanding of how their own strengths play into their behaviors and beliefs.
Meeting Guidelines
We have found the following guidelines in these team discussion sessions have proved helpful in keeping on point, surfacing solutions, and gaining acceptance:
No criticism of ideas, explanations or comments of others,
Questions encouraged for mutual understanding,
Humor acceptable without sarcasm,
No interruptions while someone is speaking,
Alternative solutions encouraged, especially attempting 5 to 10 separate ideas,
Selections of best alternatives with arguments for and against,
Review of specific insights and learning gained by the individuals and the group,
Summarization in round-robin practices, so that all members have participated.
Conclusion
Character beliefs can impact individuals and business in profound ways. People have been known to appreciate the ideas and approaches suggested here because the individual is focused on participation, contribution, and engagement. The team members and group get a clear recognition of the ideas, alternatives, and solutions created during the conversations and discussions. And, instead of hearing praise from leadership members (e.g.. reward is warranted at times depending upon the specific culture), each individual and the group gets to experience their own sense of well-being and contributions toward their growth, the end-goal and the good of the business. While this may seem like common sense for many people, these ideas take time to implement, requiring leadership buy-in, acceptance, and commitment. These concepts are designed to support what the company/business stands for, enroll employees, and other stakeholders in participating and will assist in growing people, and the business.
We further suggest that top achievers do things others don't - in our experience they participate in their life with deep beliefs, discipline, hope, and faith in one's abilities.
Footnotes
A belief discussion is essential for individuals of our American society, culture, and especially the business world, which at most recent times appears to be imploding in self-centered greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride (e.g., five of the seven deadly sins). For a personal example of what is possible with beliefs, look no further than a genuinely exceptional world figure from the sports domain: we invite you to read the Six Core-Beliefs at the Muhammad Ali Center.
We direct you to the VIA Institute on Character: Bridging the science and practice of character strengths to build a better world. We know this will assist individuals in determining their strengths with VIA's top 24 character strengths standards. These foundation character strengths by way of our thinking are beliefs: yet only when the belief has a designed specific outcome - we invite you to read about our design criteria for our Beliefs and Choices Methodology (BCM) and our introduction about Selections. if you require science to assist in your understanding of character strengths and virtues, and how they can positively impact one, we direct you to a scholarly work in the book Character Strengths & Virtues: The Handbook and Classification
