Is your team’s work environment engaging and inspiring or dull and frustrating?
An engaging and inspiring environment is usually active and noisy. People are moving around, talking and working together to solve problems and deliver solutions. Team members are pleasant and happy.
A dull and frustrating environment is usually passive and quiet. Team members work independently, not cooperatively. Interactions between team members are often tense and short. Noise may come from unhappy people arguing.
Your work environment may fall somewhere between these two extremes. Do you pay attention to the your workplace culture?
If you’re like most leaders, probably not. Leaders typically pay more attention to products and services than they do to their team (or department or company) culture. Yet culture drives everything that happens in their organization – and yours – good or bad.
Culture by default isn’t a reliable way to craft workplace inspiration. Culture by design is.
Leaders must pay equal attention to performance and values. Both are required to create a productive, safe, and inspiring work environment for everyone.
Great (and effective and inspiring) bosses are intentional about their team’s culture.
They set high standards of performance as well as high standards for values – team citizenship – to ensure a healthy workplace.
They specify desired performance expectations in observable, tangible, and measurable terms. With clear performance standards communicated and agreed to, great bosses are able to hold people accountable for those performance standards.
They also specify desired values standards – in the form of observable, tangible, and measurable behaviors. With clear values standards communicated and agreed to – and modeled by leaders – great bosses are able to hold people accountable for demonstrating those behaviors in every interaction.
Creating and managing to behaviorally defined values is a proven avenue to an engaging and inspiring work environment. Yet most leaders have never been asked to manage values and behaviors before! Leaders are more experienced and more comfortable with managing performance expectations. They’re much less experienced managing values expectations.
What leaders need is a step-by-step guide to creating and managing to values standards. I present exactly this approach in my new book, The Culture Engine.
Would your team or department benefit from high performance standards and high values expectations? Learn more about creating an organizational constitution and managing to one in my new book, The Culture Engine. Get your free sample chapter at http://thecultureengine.com.
Please leave your comments and questions in the comments section.
I usually refrain from posting articles about lessons learned from disasters, just out of respect for the events. This week though, a valuable leadership lesson was displayed to me and the words “put-out or shut-up” is what cycles through my mind.
We hear a lot these days about the death of the CV, but how does this then apply to a “career,” as we now know it? Depending on what stats you believe, we will all have a few career changes in our lives. This article explores looking at and being prepared for your next career. Competition for jobs has never been fiercer, so it is important to ensure you have decided on what you really want to do next in your ideal career before jumping from the frying pan to the fire. This requires taking a step back from just browsing the vacancies, to ensuring that you’re pursuing the best career path for yourself.
Writing this article makes me feel hugely and morbidly inadequate. This is a story of a leader that dealt with horrible odds of success, starvation, internal quarreling, physical and mental weakness of massive proportions, and the possibility of death for him and his team …every day for months and months. You may have guessed what this story is about, but I suspect, like I, that you had never really considered the leadership lessons from this amazing epic adventure. I have been involved in turn-around situations, but this is the ultimate turn-around. (If you are a skimmer, read the last paragraph).
by Dennis N. T. Perkins.
Being a leader is certainly not an easy job. As a leader, you have to deal with high levels of responsibility and pressure. Expectations are very high, no matter where they come from.
The world is full of recipes for success, but many times we forget that success comes from within ourselves with work that we do. I would even claim that success is mainly about attitude. When you have the right attitude, you focus on the right things, obstacles are there to overcome, you feel better and work more efficiently. I am sure you know what happens if you have a bad attitude: nothing seems to work at that time. Here are some questions for you to ask to become more successful through your own attitude towards other people and life. Even though you may not have answers to every one of them, thinking about these matters will already take you towards your personal success.
