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Beliefs and Attitudes

Many people do not recognise the effect of their behaviour upon others and in particular their tendency to exhibit negative behaviours until well after any damage has been done: They have a poor attitude. 


Attitudes have a significant effect on human performance and engagement that many executives and their organisations fail to recognise and understand. 


For instance, people with a poor or negative attitude are likely to under-perform, be less engaged, accountable, or even disengaged. Of more concern is that these people spread their negativity. 

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On the other hand people who are more positive with an optimistic attitude will commit, innovate, communicate, have confidence in, and create a work environment with an atmosphere where there are higher levels of performance and engagement.

Attitude and Performance


Sports psychologists have recognised for some years that talent alone is insufficient a contributor to performance with the ‘mindset’ - the mental attitude - of the sports person/s being more important. They recognise that:


Good Talent + Poor Attitude = Poor Talent

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What are Attitudes?

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“Attitudes are usually evaluative tendencies - favourable or unfavourable – towards a person, thing, event or process [an ‘object’]. An attitude towards an ‘object’ is thus a bias, predisposing a person towards evaluative responses that are positive or negative.” Peter Marr, (2002), editor of ‘Psychology at Work’.

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Our attitudes are formed from our beliefs and are externalised through our behaviour.

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We carry our attitudes around with us and like a pair of sunglasses they can ‘tint’ our perception of the world. We will interpret and react differently to situations and to other people who may have a very different view to our own. These ’tinted glasses’ – our attitudes – affect how we think (the beliefs we currently have), feel, and behave in both our daily life and particularly in our workplace.

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Attitudes at work

 

Many people do not understand the vital link between their beliefs, their attitudes, their behaviour and their performance.

Additionally, many Many people do not understand the vital link between their beliefs, their attitudes, their behaviour and their performance. 


Additionally, many organisations similarly do not understand these vital links and have unconsciously created structures, processes, systems and cultures that very often foster negative beliefs and thus attitudes that stifle the effective achievement of organisational goals from the very top down: leaders and employees with poor attitude are poor leaders and poor employees.


Attitudes in the workplace are all embracing, for they impact critical aspects of the daily performance of everyone in the organisation and the efficacy of:

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  • Leadership

  • Communication

  • Strategy implementation

  • Decision-making

  • Sales and Negotiation

  • Team working

  • Engagement

  • Performance and Productivity

  • Quality assurance

  • Customer service

  • Labour relations

  • Research and Development

  • Innovation

  • Change and Transformation

 

Can attitudes be changed?


We develop many of our beliefs and attitudes early in our life and very often these form into habits of which we are usually unaware. It is important to understand that our beliefs:

  • Are our best current thinking about something;

  • Can and do often change naturally;

  • Are frequently generalisations we have concluded from events of have been ‘given’ to us by our parents or other influential ‘others’ from our past;

  • May be ‘conscious’ but most commonly ‘unconscious’ to us – they are ‘out of our awareness’;

  • Can be ‘positive’ and empowering’ but frequently ‘negative’ and disempowering;

  • Are one of the main ‘filters’ of what we perceive of, and determine from, events;

  • Have different intensities;

  • Define our ‘model of reality’ from which we operate; and

  • Impact on the behaviours, skills and abilities we have.

 

Since all of our attitudes are shaped through learning, negative attitudes can fortunately be ‘unlearnt’ with insight, knowledge, commitment, support and time. Importantly, we can also build upon our positive attitudes. 

 

Changing an attitude begins with self-awareness and more often than not involves in our changing a belief. 
Changing beliefs, however, is not easy for as humans we find ‘change’ difficult; it may involve ‘loss’, something we are ‘hardwired’ to avoid. We may also have beliefs about change in itself that we need to examine before we can consider other beliefs that we need to change.
 

Research and Development

 

All of the work around how our beliefs influence our attitudes and impact our performances is based upon 30-years of research, learning, experience, and work with directors, executives, managers, supervisors, sales people, and teams from global and leading organisations across a broad range of business sectors, cultures, in addition to research into elite sports performers and teams.

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This research and knowledge has been brought together in the ‘Beliefs and Attitudes Mindset’ instrument, an online questionnaire and report to help people understand their beliefs and attitudes.

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To find out more about how beliefs and attitudes may be impacting the performance of your people, business, organisation, or the people you work with and to discuss how using the ‘Beliefs and Attitudes Mindset’ instrument with your people could help you.

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