Most of us understand personal stress, particularly if we have been running a business this year. However, we might not think that our organisation could suffer from stress, but it can.

It has long been recognised that organisations display behavioural characteristics which can be seen as an outward-facing personality, the Business Personality external profile (BPe) and an inward-facing personality, the Business Personality internal profile (BPi).

Consequently, we might conclude that an organisation’s behaviour starts to become more and more dysfunctional, as the differential between the BPe and the BPi increases.

What do we mean by the terms BPe and BPi?

We might, for example, define BPe as how an organisation would wish to been seen by its staff, clients, partners and suppliers. Its image or brand as defined through its internal and external communications.

Conversely, an organisation's BPi will usually be defined through its culture as determined by the behaviour and attitudes of its staff, senior managers, directors and shareholders.

In both cases, the personalities are driven by the behavioural characteristics of the stakeholders, be they employees and managers or investors and shareholders and it is the degree of imbalance between the two personalities which leads to operational stress.

But how might this affect our own organisation?

Poor productivity, low morale, staff losses and ultimately a degradation of a company’s health in the balance sheet are the most obvious signals.

So why is it so hard to recognise and address the root causes of operational stress in our own organisations?

In fact, most of us do recognise and acknowledge the signals very early on and we make genuine efforts to remedy the symptoms.

However, very few of us ultimately choose to remedy the root cause, because that involves us facing up to our own inadequacies; and basic human nature suggests that we would always attempt to avoid this pain of introspection over the easier option of remedial diagnosis.

Isn’t it so much more comfortable to perpetrate the little white lie about the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ rather than lift the lid of ‘Pandora’s Box’ and look into the soul of our organisation with all the uncertainty of what we might encounter there.

Self-interest and survival are the strongest of all motivators in corporate and organisational life. And yet, to truly understand the dynamics of what creates stress in any organisation, requires a huge leap of faith by those who control them in those who run them, to address the root causes and not symptoms of their ailments and reduce its overall effect on their business.

About the author: Charles Helliwell is the founding partner of Business Personality Audits and has been in private practice for over 15 years as a Business Relationship Expert, specialising in Business Development and Revenue Generation. He has worked with multiple business sectors including Banking, Distribution, Dotcoms, Entertainment, FMCG, Industrial, IT, Media, Petrochemical, Telecoms and is part of the Government’s e-mentoring pilot project.