Michael Schulz founder of MBC International interview Senior Manager Peter Brown discuss key personal and business issues caused by COVID-19

Senior Managers and Business Owners will find this relevant as they navigate the rapid rate of change and dysfunctionality in the workplace

Video Transcription

Micheal Schulz

Well, I’m Micheal Schulz from Mentors and Business Coaches International and in this session, we will consider some of the key issues executives and business owners have to deal with, and how we mentors and business coaches international can assist.

Today, I have the privilege of introducing you to Peter Brown, the senior manager in a large global company who has agreed to share his thoughts on some of the key issues that he encounters.

Peter, thank you for your precious time. So what are some key issues both at work and personal that you’ve had to deal with or dealing with?

Peter Brown

Thank you, Michael, thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts. It’s a good question, I would say in the current climate we currently face, there’s three things that are top of mind for me.

The first one is just the sheer rapid rate of change and all the uncertainty that brings to people organizations and teams. I think the second piece is the the leadership that’s required to try and navigate all this contagion and the world and people are facing. And then thirdly, I think it’s the dysfunction that all those two things create down to individual organizations, teams, and people trying to navigate their way through.

So I’d see it in that lens, rapid change, leadership during contagion, and the dysfunction that it causes. And when I think about this dysfunction, I would think about it from three perspectives. One is from a business organizational perspective. And what I mean by that is, I’ve seen in my career, often organizations losing this their core sense of being you know, why they really operate, what purpose do they serve?

How do they, how do they meet their customers needs and serve their core activities. And often during these times organizations can lose sight of that, or the external environment can change so rapidly, that that seems to be no longer relevant. So that often creates a lot of dysfunction. And how do you deal with that, at an organizational level?

In my view, I think it really goes back to restating the core purpose of the organization, communicating very, very clearly and often as to what your core purpose is in rolling your team and your stakeholders. And really reinforcing those desired behaviors and acting and living them out.

So you’re demonstrating those in real life to all of your stakeholders.

When I think of teams, and the dysfunction is causing teams often have some pain of saying teams that are dysfunctional, of saying toxic cultures. And for me, it goes back to the culture that’s credit inside of that team, you can have a very poor culture, and the team seems to work, okay. But when you look beneath that surface, you’ll you’ll never see a strong team has a poor culture.

So to me, the most important things to dealing with dysfunction is to have a strong team culture. And any high performing team you see in business or in sport, has these same traits, open, honest environments, open, honest dialogue, and encouraging and supporting continuous improving mindset, and a really strong cultural and empathic leadership. So I think, for teams, that’s how that’s how you can help cope with dysfunction. And I think when you get right to the bottom of the chain, the individual is trying to navigate their way through all these rapid changes in the world.

Sometimes you see people who are performing, okay, they’re working, okay, but every now and again, I’ll have an issue or, or something like that a character. To me, you’ve got to take notice of those signals. And that’s often symptomatic of something deeper.

So you have to try and find what is the root of that dysfunction. And then you can only do that by talking and connecting with people. But if you can uncover what the root of that dysfunction is, you can then do something about it, you can create an environment that’s supportive, you can help the person individually. But if you can help uncover those things, the person invariably will feel more valued, more supportive, their performance will improve. And this goes to culture, it goes to helping the team, most common organization, I think all those issues are interconnected from our viewpoint.

Michael Schultz

That’s, that’s fantastic. I love the word core purpose, I love the word getting to the root of the problem, and this is pretty much what MCBI we do, because you’ve identified obviously, some stuff that’s new, because of COVID and some stuff that’s old.

And the uncertainty is very much out there. We know that let me be very clear in terms of trying to differentiate that here are coaches. We don’t actually tell people what to do.

We know that this is often often times in the industry, we feel that the solutions to problems from within the root if you like, would have a bit of weight and I love that term. Because only you know your organization’s culture and uh, you know, your organization values, and uh, you know, your organization systems and we see our role is to extract almost – like a dentist extract the answers from you, they help you to implement the change.

Easy to say, not easy to do.

So we enter on a journey with them with our executives and our team people as coaches but standing back as a coach not to tell, but not to advise. And we do know that at the end of the day, it’s people that make or break a company, to simple as that.

You can have all the best systems, and all the pretty words if you like, and all the nice statements out, but at the end of the day, it’s people and they. And so we want to focus on people and the solutions that come and the challenges from that point of view.

So Peter, thank you for that we’ve had this time together, anybody can look at their website, which is in the mbcint.com. And certainly I’m sure that we’ll be talking some more with you at a later time.

Thanks again, Peter.

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