British businesses work at a fraction of their efficiency—so no wonder the economy’s in meltdown. That’s the message management consultant Ashley Bookman keeps hearing.
But he believes we can transform our fortunes—if we just stop making five key mistakes:

1. Chestpuffing

This is the kind of egotistical behaviour that causes executives to brag about their professional achievements or how their organisation is a leader in its field. To the listener, chestpuffing sounds like untreated arrogance. It also drives the testosterone-led competitions for organisational leadership. With everyone competing to show how clever they are, most of the time and energy is invested in self-promotion rather than business problem-solving and delivery. Sadly, this “Aren’t I the clever one?” attitude covers an insecurity that makes it difficult both for individuals and for organisations to look at how they might actually become as good as they claim to be.
• The chest puffer is often trying to demonstrate that they are better than someone else, and only while they maintain this perception will they feel good about themselves.

2. Relationship Soup
This is what we tend to drown in when we become overly obsessed by making sure that everyone’s happy all the time. You hear people saying, “Are you comfortable with that?” or “Is everyone happy with this decision?”
This behaviour is fairly delusional because, in reality, not everyone will be happy with most decisions, and in many cases too much power is given to the unhappy few. Entire organisations become paralysed by endless rounds of checking up and down the line for fear of causing offence, and employees are treated as though they’re not adult enough to understand a clear rationale for a sound business decision.
• Relationship soup is prevalent in teams where the manager believes that their people need to be looked after. The manager prides themself on being a caring manager, but this approach is in part taken to maintain their own sense of self-worth.

3. Blaming
Not a new phenomenon by any means, but perhaps the most pervasive of all the organisational sicknesses. This judgmental habit, with its focus on the past, delays us from seeing the cause of a mistake and providing a clear procedure for preventing its recurrence in future. The blaming of someone else is often carried out to save our own skins. In some cases—when we are, in reality, part-responsible for a particular mistake—we do it to prevent ourselves seeing our own inadequacies.
• Blaming someone else means that we don’t have to look at our own faults.

4. Victim Mentality
This is increasingly prevalent. It’s demonstrated when people don’t project themselves into problem-solving, preferring to complain about the problem rather than collaborate to fix it. For those suffering from victim-mentality, life is just too difficult. Often reinforced by too much blaming, victim mentality is a cop out. Sometimes it’s found with good reason in highly regulated industries where it can be genuinely difficult to get things done, but the buzzword for people with this tendency is “can’t”.
• Those suffering from victim mentality state their inadequate feelings in more obvious ways.

5. Whatting
This is now a corporate epidemic, but quite understandably people ask, “What is whatting?”At its heart, it’s our ability to analyse and take in information without actually doing anything about it. For example, a healthy lifestyle is far more popular than it used to be, and smoking is banned in public spaces. But research showed a clear link between smoking and heart and lung disease back in the 1980s; 25 years later we have the (sadly, necessary) legislation to support it.
Whatting at work is demonstrated in all kinds of ways: people become overly focused on what the procedure states instead of trying to deliver on its purpose; leadership talks about what the problem is instead of contributing to doing something about it; strategically, manage-ment looks repeatedly at what the new organisational structure should be, while completely failing to notice that many of the problems lie in their business methods or professional behaviour. 

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