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By Carol Sanford

Article of the Month

What does Consciousness Have to do with Work?

First, let us define Consciousness. There are three Levels of Consciousness that really matter in a work environment. With each level, the parties involved attain a greater scope and deeper consideration of actions.

Levels of Consciousness

Level One: Performance Level Consciousness: Guiding Self
Individuals and groups intentionally choose what and how they think about any subject and make sure their choices are going to produce something better than routine/mechanical thinking would produce.

Level Two: Developmental Level Consciousness: Affect Potential
At this level a person takes into account the effect of actions on other persons and entities beyond their organization. They work to choose actions and thoughts that contribute to (versus detract from) not only their own effectiveness and success – but also the effectiveness and success of other persons and organizations. Focus is on actions and thinking that realizes more potential for all stakeholders to their organizations including employee and community concerns.

Level Three: Evolutionary Level Consciousness: Pursue Essence
At this level people aim to understand and evolve the unique essence of each person and entity that they seek to affect. This understanding requires going beyond generalities to uncovering the essence of an entity, a raw material, a product or a market - leading to an understanding of a person’s or entities uniqueness that can be tapped for exponential growth.

Consciousness Applied to Kinds of Work

We can think of work as the application of mental or physical energy to produce a change in the form or state of something—to make it more valuable or meaningful. Particularly, when we are seeking to create value-adding efforts to benefit the stakeholders to our products. Let’s look at Level One Consciousness examples:

Executive work that needs consciousness:
Executives give direction to a business or portfolio of businesses. This calls for evoking collective consciousness where individuals must be able to guide their own behavior in the context of the overall business direction. Direction, when it is given, must come from a conscious executive where all other decisions and work seem consistent. This makes possible an organization that is highly aligned.

You know you need consciousness work when: there is a breakdown between the strategic direction and execution; your overall portfolio of products and services are moving toward lower margins and commodity markets; your performance measures are based on doing either more or less of what you did last year. (e.g. 10 increase in sales and decrease in expenses to get it)
Manager work that needs consciousness:
Managers must lead people in effective use of resources, ensuring targeted effort on the right things. They are also held accountability for improving the use of resources over time for a greater return on investment.

You know you need consciousness work when: you feel you are constantly having to keep people on track and manage variances; you are fighting the need to manage against inefficiencies, constantly or often losing effectiveness in the process; management of variances drives the use of resource improvement; people do not seem to use good judgment on where to apply energy and effort.
Leadership work that need consciousness:
Leaders are responsible for creating an environment where spirit and will are focused on energy-effective results. They enliven a culture that fits the strategy and brings people toward strategic work with new energy and hope.

You know you need consciousness work when: you have a workforce that is unfocused, unhappy or have high turnover; you have blaming and excuses explaining shortfalls. You put a lot of energy into incentives, reward/recognition programs and discipline programs. You are working on competencies and performance management as a way to inspire and focus people rather than lead a self-motivated workforce focused on strategy.
Administration work that needs consciousness:
Administrators frequently help the organization track effort and results and inform the managers where they are in relation to goals. They must provide information that actually fosters decision-making and understanding versus that which buries people and takes them further away from that to which they should be paying attention.

You know you need consciousness work when: paper work builds up and people complain about doing it or do it half-heartedly. Reporting focuses people on internal competition rather than the real competition. Your job is guaranteed mostly by the requirements of law and regulators, not internal value generated by how the organization uses your offices.
Operational work that needs consciousness:
Operating teams produce and/or deliver the products and services of the organization against an overall plan and strategic direction. The must match customer and market requirements better than the competition and create improvements in the means of production and delivery.

You know when you need consciousness work when: people only do what they are told and try to get out of some of that; you are falling short on quality and service targets and people think it is someone else’s problem; lots of energy goes into holding people’s feet to the fire on deadlines and standards being met.
Functional work:
Functions in the organization have responsibility for keeping the standards of their profession at the highest level and in service of the strategic direction. This includes Sales, Marketing, Engineering, etc.

You know you need consciousness work when: departments are not cooperating and use one another as scapegoats; you are not getting people promoted out of each function as over all leaders of the organization; the function drives the whole organization because you are a _______ (fill in the blank—marketing company, R&D company, etc.)
Customer Service work that needs consciousness: Customer service is at minimum, a fall back position and the one who touches your customer most often. For most customers, you are your customer service department—for better or worse.

You know you need consciousness work when: you spend a great of time taking over-difficult calls; it takes two or three follows-up actions to any call; you have no time to improve your customer service department

Of course, consciousness doesn’t just have to do with work, it has to do with the desire and ability to grow in any human endeavor. But great work cannot be done, great companies cannot be built and great results cannot be sustained without consciousness.