I have a friend with whom I was discussing an idea 2 years ago, and we decided to test this idea to see where it got us.
My friend works for a technology company – and like me, she focuses a lot of attention on culture, engagement and leadership.
So she told me that her workplace was quite progressive – they wanted their teams to have autonomy, they offered flexible working, the people were really nice and the work, while technically complex, was challenging. All this kept people engaged.
She kept on highlighting what a great workplace hers was – except she felt that not everyone saw the workplace for what it was – a wonderful place to work.
Now my friend had a lot of influence but no positional power or authority. She was well liked and respected among her colleagues. So we decided to test this idea.
I asked her this.
What if you actually started talking about what a great place it was – and explicitly said the culture was great and the people were nice? What if you spoke up and unapologetically called out the great culture?
She felt it was an idea worth testing. And so she started doing that. She started posting on the Slack community channels and Town Halls about the culture of the place.
Each time she spoke to individuals or groups, she highlighted the culture of the organisation and how strong it was. This was 18 months ago.
Last month she called me up to tell me two things:
1) in their culture survey, there had been a rise in engagement
2) senior leaders were now speaking about the wonderful culture of the organisation- and people were now identifying the culture as being part of their brand identity.
My friend was overjoyed that our thought experiment had succeeded. Now she is smart enough to know that there were many factors that contributed to the wonderful culture – but she also knew that her talking about it made the subtle idea explicit.
So friends, sometimes, some things need to be called out explicitly. What are the great things in your organisation that no one is highlighting?
#culture #leadership # #influence
