Published:

08/22/2014 04:26am

Creating Effective People

As I read about the global war for talent I wonder about the employees who are not considered talent. While we are in great need of talent to drive leadership and fill pipelines for succession planning, we most often look outside of the organization to find these employees.

Baby boomers are leaving the workforce taking wisdom and experience with them. Generation X are next in line ready to take charge. So what does it take to push this lot of employees to become talent?

When I think of talent I think of a competent, passionate employee who is aligned in personal values to the organization's values. This person is connected to his inner resources. He is able to tap into his sense of resilience and confidence to make the talent pool.

I know from many years of working in organizations that when employees feel this connection, they are able to go many steps ahead from where they first started. Any employee who chooses to make himself or herself better than what he or she is capable of today, has the potential to hit new targets never achieved before.

The first step is to want more. Once your unconscious mind is aware of this desire, creating the goal is an easy-enough step that follows. More importantly becoming the Steven Spielberg of your mind is of paramount importance. Designing the goal so that you see, hear and feel the goal creates a sense of "realness" of the goal to be achieved.

In order for an employee to be effective, they need to eradicate the negative emotions that may plague them from the past. Most people are not aware that we are born into family patterns that we take on without question. These become part of our make-up until we decide that a specific pattern may not work for us anymore.

Gender domination (males are better than females), sibling inequality (eldest gets more say than youngest), pushovers' syndrome (no voice to stand up for yourself) are some examples I have come across, amongst the many that exist. If we put up with this when we are young we are probably going to put up with these same patterns when we go out into the workforce and when we form our families.

These behavior patterns usually have negative emotions attached to them. It could be that you are angry that you allow people to push you around or sad that you are treated as inferior because you are a woman. Negative emotions attach themselves to behavior patterns.

As soon as a person decides they have had enough and the behavior is not working for them any longer, they have the ability to eradicate it. This is how we create effective people. An employee who has abandoned his or her limiting behavior pattern, feels free as soon as the negative emotion is released.

Some clients have described this release as breaking down a brick wall that always existed in their mind. Others just have a light feeling and months later results produced show far superior targets have been achieved.

You might ask "how easy is it to create effective people?" My answer is "real easy" The person must want to do it. Following this there are a few processes carried out in a one-on-one or group session.

A high performer at a call center said she was referred to as a "top performer" because she was but deep inside her she felt she was nowhere near her best.

To her good fortune she worked for a company that decided to do some Neuro Linguistic Programming courses for their employees. Being a top performer she was included in these workshops. She was aware of a family behavior pattern that she felt did not work for her anymore. She wanted out.

She was part of a group of colleagues when we went through the facilitated session. She wrote to me a few months later to inform me how her life had transformed from a mere few days of processing her internal self. She was still a top performer but had overshot her previous targets and knew she was at her personal optimal performance.

Imagine having something like this happen to your employees? Wouldn't you just love to see them fly way beyond their present performance? Your search for talent would not have to go far. You'd have motivated and passionate employees sprout up around you. The question for you now is "are you creating effective people in your company?"

Sylvia Fernandes is the Founder & CEO of VIA Frontiers. She is also the author of Bye Bye Black Cat – Turn Your Luck Around to Realise Opportunities – to be launched on the 9th October 2014. She has been conducting corporate training and consulting to create effective people in the Asia Pacific Region for the last 12 years. She is currently based in Singapore. Go to www.viafrontiers.com or email blog@viafrontiers.com for more information.