FORGET TEAM BUILDING AND BONDING. EXPERTS SAY CATERING TO INDIVIDUAL EMPLOYEE'S PERSONAL DESIRES YIELDS FAR MORE GAINS IN PRODUCTIVITY.
As anyone who ever entered the hallowed grounds of management knows, once you earn the office, the title, and the professional perks, you also begin to inherit a little thing the company literature likes to refer to as a staff. With that comes the knowledge that you must do more than plan, articulate, and execute your own list of duties and goals. You must do that for a group that may or may not share your sense of humor (Dilbert cartoons), priorities (the bottom line, of course), work schedule (24-7), or dress sense (per the GQ bible). And mobilizing a group of individuals toward one corporate vision is tough terrain. Heck, most businesses had a hard time pulling off the collective fashion statement formerly known as casual Fridays. Anyone part of an organization knows precisely what Doors frontman Jim Morrison means when he sings, "People Are Strange."      

But the concept of aligning a disparate group of individuals for the good of a company is undergoing a 21st-century makeover, as an avalanche of books, speakers, and coaching programs shifts attention away from the "team" and toward the individual and his or her pursuit of personal satisfaction.

"I spent 10 years looking at organizational change, and what I found was I didn't have one organization, but I had 3,500 different worlds that just happened to collide between nine and five," says Phil Holmes, managing director and co-owner of The Resonance Principle, a Scottish company operating throughout Europe, whose new coaching program helps individuals and organizations understand the concept of personal satisfaction and apply it within a management context. For Holmes, the company best benefits from individuals who are allowed to explore and act upon the duties and qualities that yield them the most satisfaction.