Personal Spirit-The Fuel Every Workplace Needs

My colleague Bob Wiele created the assessment tool One Smart World a while back. Its value to personal and organizational achievement can easily be missed unless someone understands the power of the human spirit as a determinant for success: personal, professional and organizational. Bob has put an explanation of how personal spirit is measured on his blog. It is really a reprint of an article done by the Journal of Psychology and it describes with simplicity the component parts. Head to Bob's Blog to read that in detail.

Personal spirit as initiative, sense of control, and outlook becomes the collective expression of one's ability to receive change, to adapt, flex and alter course of action quickly and at the root become the fulcrum through which intergenerational differences surface as a common playing field. Senior workers turfed early from the workforce will have been depleted on one or more of these three levels. Youth come into the workforce and if they are not able to exercise their initiative they will exercise their sense of control over their lives and leave. In contrast, boomers and traditionalists have been trained to self-sacrifice which naturally depletes their sense of control, initiative and outlook - the lens the world is viewed through.

All this takes place on a personal level. But what about the workplace? Epigenetics tells us that the environment informs cellular response making the immediate connection between the quality of the working environment and support for employees to contribute.

Without exploring and becoming aware of where you are at and where the workplace is at, it would appear that turf wars, silos, depression, addiction and stress related illness will serve as a wedge between what employees can contribute and what the workplace is willing to receive. Closing performance gaps may simply be a case of raising organizational and self-awareness to higher levels.

How much receptivity is there in your workplace to truly contribute talent you know you have not yet tapped into?