It requires a transformation of attitude/attitude/attitude towards the action partner, the goal and oneself (task, oneself, others). Instead of being trapped in individual or organizational narcissism, focusing only on one’s own needs, goals and missions, and in doing so violating the boundaries of others, the path to excellence requires consideration and appreciation of the person, his or her limits and also his or her development. Only then is there the basis for a lasting bond. Every imbalance on the one hand has a destructive effect on the relationship and on the other hand robs the connection and unity which is necessary to be able to solve really progressive and excellent problems.

The stronger the solidarity, the stronger the unity, the ability to act together, in which the secret of genuine excellence lies hidden. Everyone gives their best – together for the customer. When all parties are in open dialogue and learners with each other, they are on the common path to excellence together.

A person and also organizations that want to be successful in the long run should therefore strive for a transformation in the thinking and acting of their members, away from narcissism towards solidarity by preserving the boundaries of their employees, suppliers, customers, partners of all kinds. Integrity can actually be trained. However, it must be firmly and bindingly anchored in the basic values of the organization. First-level managers in the company in particular must want, live and specifically promote integrity. This is the only way to internalize integrity at all levels and lead to sustainable relationships – inside and outside the company.

Many business relationships suffer from a lack of sustainability. What is the reason for this? In short, our observation and research show that this phenomenon can be traced back to one cause: business relationships ultimately break down because one person wants to exploit the other or even exploit him one-sidedly – in other words, still seeks his personal profit even when the other person is already on the ground. Being made a loser involves a loss of face.

In some contexts, it can be experienced how the limits are maintained for a certain period of time, for example, to study the system or the other person. After the system or counterpart has been recorded and access to its system has been created, border observation is abandoned and only one’s own advantage is sought. The partner is therefore used as a stirrup for the personal success that is sought. After initially possibly good and successful cooperation, a perceived or actual imbalance arises. The relationship is doomed to failure from the moment the imbalance occurs.

It lacks a solid foundation: integrity. To be integer means to be connected in the relationship and not isolated. Many problems of our time can be traced back to individualization. This affects individuals as well as organizations. Connectedness arises from the fact that the boundary of the other is preserved. If this happens, then the feeling of appreciation is preserved. If the border of the other is (repeatedly) violated, then the person whose border is violated feels a lack of appreciation and distances himself from this intruder.

Only if both sides are permanent winners and also feel this way, will the basis of a lasting bond remain. The foundation is laid for real excellence to have a chance. Excellence only develops when everyone gives their best and this requires a positive motivation. Both parties give their utmost to the task since they are winners.

A good TEAM is unbeatable – this is true and applies everywhere: Whether in sports, politics or in the company – good teams perform and strive for more! So it’s no wonder that the ability to work in a team is advertised, desired and coveted in any job advertisement. But often the desire is the father of the thought. The reality in many companies is quite different: Everyone thinks (only) of himself, a common goal is not pursued or only very insufficiently pursued. What needs to be done together in today’s world?

High-performance teams are good role models because they have special characteristics:

• The team members are aligned to the goals to be achieved together.
• The distribution of roles and tasks is based on skills and strengths
• The relationships of the team members are characterized by respect, esteem, and trust.
• The team members have developed accepted rules of conduct and adhere to them.

The question for any responsible leader is: How do I turn a group into a team with the above characteristics? Team development is one of the greatest challenges for companies because the overall clout is determined by the quality of the cooperation between the people involved. Exaggerated individualism and blind individualism do immense damage. The performance and the will to perform of most employees depend to a large extent on the conditions of the respective working environment and on the nature and quality of the relationships with the immediate colleagues.

“We must do something urgently…” – in this or a similar way one hears more and more managers, emphasize more and more often and more strongly! Causes? Increasing and ever faster external influences, which demand lived flexibility and innovation from people and organizations.

Flexibility means being able to meet challenges quickly and safely (with the right form of work). However, specialists and managers have not learned enough how to use change effectively. Flexibility and innovation (innovation = ability to solve problems) are in many places not among the virtues of the working world and are certainly even less so in the first place of German culture. On the contrary: stabilizing, preserving, perfecting, preserving, maintaining, traditionalizing – this corresponds to us, gives us joy and support. The accompanying sobering statement of our time:

There are too many people who are professionals at preserving the old and amateurs at trying the new!

Even if the first step, the insight into the necessary change, is done, many organizations fail in addition, technical and high-level personnel in the next step: the experience and tools of practical change know how´s are missing. A sure instinct and the right procedural strategy are the decisive success factors. Mistakes are punished with lacking readiness for change and resistance – the largest hurdles with changes in organizations.

Innovation is a self-runner in healthy companies, it is a matter of course. In a healthy company, other dynamics prevail. In sick companies, innovation must be initiated, generated and implemented under pressure.

In healthy companies, on the other hand, the employee no longer sees himself as someone who has to complete an order. He does it of his own free will, precisely because he has recognized that he is making a meaningful contribution to (world) society and not just earning a living.

In a healthy company, the employee sees himself as someone who has the task of reinventing the company, his own job, and even himself on a daily basis, and thus being the motor of innovation. 

Whether an employee, a supplier or even a customer is prepared to show such a degree of integrity towards the company depends to a large extent on how he is treated and how he deals with himself. In a healthy company, every stakeholder knows that he or she is important and valued for success. He is not a means to an end, but a partner. He notices that his contribution can make a difference and is valued for it. This appreciation forms the basis of his integrity and is the foundation of his performance and will.

Here, too, an urgent paradigm shift is necessary. In particular, the higher-level controlling and management processes in most companies prevent employees, suppliers, and customers from seeing themselves as innovators. The lack of inclusion and consideration prevents integrity in relation to the assumption of responsibility for the future by the employee. The employee withdraws into his excerpt, does not think and act innovatively in the sense of the whole company, which would also immediately bring him into massive conflict with the existing systems. The innovative power of employees, suppliers, and customers is massively blocked and does not benefit the company. The situation is quite different with companies that succeed in having their employees see themselves as innovation managers who have the mandate and mandate to reinvent the company and themselves every day.

Conclusion

Healthy companies are the organizations in which or with which people want to work permanently as employees, suppliers or customers. They experience esteem, partnership, joint development and shaping the future. Healthy companies create integrity together with their partners and are resilient, stable and innovative. They make a contribution to society and consequently produce social relevance and sustainability.

In healthy companies, success is not based on the harm done to others. Healthy companies do not make losers. Neither the supplier nor the customer nor the employee is exploited and made a loser. Exactly this is, however, the today prevailing model in particular of many large companies. The fact that this exploitation model is not systemically balanced and thus cannot lead to entrepreneurial success in the long term is as certain as our knowledge that balancing justice is sought in every system. The fewer losers there are, the more stable a system is. This fact leads to healthy companies using all the levers to avoid that there are losers in the company’s system.

Excellence at all levels always emerges by itself where there are no losers.

If everyone is a winner, everyone gives their best, because the condition is optimal. If someone feels like a loser, he will make his bet dependent on how much a winning position can be expected. It is therefore almost logical that healthy companies do everything they can to ensure that not only does nobody feel like a loser, but also that nobody is a loser, neither the supplier, nor the customer, nor the employee.

The opposite can be observed at the moment. Many companies are pursuing the declared strategy of improving their profits on the basis of better strategic exploitation of suppliers, employees, and customers. Such an approach inevitably leads to the loss of stability and resilience as well as sustainability and uncertainty of the continued existence of the company. Even if the aforementioned effects do not occur immediately, the effect after the dam has broken is all the more devastating for the company.

In the practice of management consulting, it can be observed again and again that companies claim pure profit maximization as their highest goal. Stilblüten are driven there, where a bare turnover or profit goal is spent as a vision of the enterprise, possibly still with missing or inappropriate coworker and/or high-level personnel participation in economic success. It is hard to believe how intellectually underdeveloped a company’s employees will be, assuming that such a mission and vision could have even a trace of motivating effect.

Healthy companies are on a morally “good” and desirable mission with the entire corporate community (investors, employees, suppliers, customers). The mission describes why it is good that the company’s products/services exist and why or how they help. Whether mobility, flexibility, recreation, comfort, workability, information, assistance, nutrition… and a thousand other meaningful things – without a world-changing and problem-solving mission, the organization loses its basic right to exist. So it can never be the mission of the company to make as much profit as possible and at the same time to develop a meaningful effect with this mission. Healthy companies ALWAYS see their mission, the beneficial mission in the foreground and regard the operating result as the effect of their sense creation. In particular, this promotes integrity (wholeness/connectedness) of all those involved with the company.

The vision is always nourished by the mission, by the mission that needs to be visionarily expanded. An unhealthy understanding of vision and mission in the company abolishes identification and integrity with the organization and reduces people to a purely extrinsic, motivated being. A paradigm shift is again necessary because even in this approach an old school of the economy is visible that has long been regarded as outdated and rather serves a human image of scientific management than a systemic approach.

Healthy organizations do almost everything they can to keep employees and even suppliers and customers informed about the usefulness and social contribution of their products and services.

In healthy organizations, the vision never describes a size goal, but always a social impact.

The corporate strategy is the sum of all the plans of managers and employees in the company, which are intended to make the long-term survival of the company possible by considering the possible alternative future prospects in the company and the environments relevant to the company.

The target bearers of every strategy are all those involved in the company, not just the management because everyone is affected and interested in the continued existence of the company. Strategy development and implementation is still regarded as a top-down process in large parts of the academic world and, above all, by most management consultancies. Here an almost impenetrable dogma prevails. The justification for this approach is that it is necessary to set targets from above because employees are not competent to develop the strategy. Behind this paradigm of thinking, which has been conveyed for many years, a Tayloristic approach can be seen: A distinction is made between manual and mental work. And practice teaches us better over and over again: In almost every company in which the strategy is understood as a TOP-DOWN process, we have observed for years that it basically dies at the second or at the latest third management level and from then on is no longer implemented in the company. Even the middle management therefore no longer really accepts the strategy, not to mention the employees who carry out the daily work. Even complex measures to communicate strategy are often unsuccessful, it does not penetrate into the workforce, is neither understood, affirmed and internalized nor lived. Who is surprised? A paradigm shift is urgently needed here.

In an unhealthy company, employees, customers, suppliers, and their representatives are just resources that have to work. This corresponds to a long outdated image of men from scientific management and Fordism, which, however, is unfortunately still and felt in practice in recent years again strongly increasingly to be found. The tendency to reform is not a necessity, but a means to an end at the expense of the quality of the partnership in order to increase one’s own profit. The motto: The collaborating, supplying, buying person must adapt to the system and function. If he does not function, he is replaced.

In the Human Resources and Human Relations approaches that will follow later, the motivation of people has been recognized as a business success factor – but it is still only a means to an end. The motivation of the human being must, therefore, be exploited as optimally as possible in order to achieve one’s own selfish corporate goals. The logical consequence of this attitude is often the attempt with and without cheap tricks to exploit the motivation of employees, suppliers, and customers for one’s own advantage. This does not really mean that something is gained in the interests of the stakeholders. Thus a self-generated togetherness arises, which is a game of losing between exploitation, submission, hypocrisy, and camouflage in both directions. The result is neither professional quality nor excellent results and successes, a large part of the energy goes into the “strategic management” of relationships, instead of creating high product and service quality and optimal result achievement. Actually, there is no friendly solidarity with mutual esteem and common goals, but only an exploiting community of convenience. True integrity (connectedness) does not exist in such cooperation, but it can be found wherever top performance is required.

What would happen if the key to releasing authentic motivation were to lie in seeking and recognizing the real benefits for the employee, the supplier and the customer? A real bond, a real wholeness (integrity) as a starting point. The consequences of such a claim attitude towards the action partners would be that one would truly turn one’s attention to the successful participants and consider how they can really be integrated in order to become better themselves, as it were. This means that the partners do not merely have to function, but that they form a unity with each other (integrity). It is no longer primarily a matter of exploiting the other for one’s own advantage, but of developing further in partnership through mutual respect and esteem.

Coaching is a type of employee training and support that is becoming increasingly popular across all hierarchical levels. It offers people support, e.g. in change processes, but also in general everyday work, and serves personality development. Coaching is individual training and therefore probably the most intensive form of employee support. It is no wonder that coaching has the greatest effect on all consulting instruments.

Theoretical knowledge is important, for example about how a conflict discussion with a project employee can and should be conducted. But all theory is only useful if it gets from the “head into the hands”. Coaching is, among other things, an excellent instrument when it comes to putting what is theoretically known into practice.

Only those who know themselves well are able to change themselves. During the coaching process, the employees check their own behavior towards others and in the team. The central concern is to positively develop leadership quality and thus leadership success and/or teamwork.

The occasions are as varied as the coachees are. The following table shows possible occasions: