Recently I went to a business forum that gave all of those that attended some amazing insights, with a lot of great speakers and great professionals. There were a couple of things that really interested me, but one in particular. I listened to a chap called Matthew Syed – he has got a new book out called “Black Box Thinking”. It is all about the differences in having fixed mindsets, where you are always right and things cannot or will not be challenged, and having an open mindset, where you are constantly looking to improve. It struck me that there are many, many people out there who think they have got an open mindset when actually they have not.This content will be shown in the summary on the main blog page. Click on this text to edit it. 
Recently I went to a business forum that gave all of those that attended some amazing insights, with a lot of great speakers and great professionals. There were a couple of things that really interested me, but one in particular. I listened to a chap called Matthew Syed – he has got a new book out called “Black Box Thinking”. It is all about the differences in having a fixed mindset, where you are always right and things cannot or will not be challenged, and having an open mindset, where you are constantly looking to improve. It struck me that there are many, many people out there who think they have got an open mindset when actually they have not. 
 
I really must recommend anyone that is running a company or team to read this book as it has some fascinating insights into the psychological and emotional reasons why people, and highly educated and professional people, can completely miss massive learning opportunities and ways to improve. It then discusses why humans are actually hard wired to do this, cognitive dissonance. Amazing stuff that we are going to start to implement. 
 
What we have always looked at within HSL Building Services is how we can encourage all of our staff to challenge themselves, to challenge the management structure, to challenge the customer service structure, just to come up with little tiny improvements all the time. We actively encourage mistakes so that we can learn from those mistakes, whether it is an operational mistake, an ordering mistake, a logistics mistake. Human beings are inheritantly full of mistakes and errors and often too frightened to admit to them, which leads to a fixed, closed mindset where everything is OK in the world, we have all heard the phrase, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. 
 
I would like to change that phrase to, “if it ain’t broke, it probably could be working better” and that is what we will be encouraging everybody in the company to do over the next six months. What could make our boat go faster; what little change could make a big difference to how we deliver what we do to all our clients and that is what we are going to be focussing on for all of you for the next six to twelve months. 
 
We have a history within HSL Building Services of evolution and this year we were recognised at the Action Coach Business Excellence Forum in Harrogate where we were a finalist within the Best Customer Service category. Out of over 350 companies that entered the category, we were pretty chuffed.This content will only be shown when viewing the full post.  
 
Share this post:

Leave a comment: 

Our site uses cookies. For more information, see our cookie policy. Accept cookies and close
Reject cookies Manage settings