Build a healthy culture

Steps you can take to improve your organization’s culture:

Ensure people know what is expected of them

  • Create clarity around roles, responsibilities, and expectations (for alignment)

    • Role clarity reduces anxiety and micromangement

Make sure your employees know you value & appreciate them

  • Employees who feel recognized are more engaged, productive, and loyal

    •  “Good job” is not enough. Say what mattered 

Be a coach who is interested in employees’ development

  • Provide opportunities to learn and advance

    • People want their potential developed

      • Stagnation is a top driver of disengagement

    • Intentional training, mentoring, delegation

  • Provide strengths-based feedback that’s timely, specific, authentic

Connect work to a sense of meaning (relevance)

  • Employees can see how their work matters

  • Employees’ opinions count and they feel respected

    • Belonging strongly correlates to retention and resiliency

  • Psychological safety is foundational to performance

Listen & connect

  • People want to work with those who understand them (Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator)

  • Seek first to understand, then to be understood – key to effective communication (Stephen Covey)

Healthy boundaries

  • Empower people (don’t micromanage or triangulate)

Thoughtful approach to conflict

  • Goal of commitment and cohesion

  • Everyone understands what is considered acceptable behavior

  • Defined around issues and ideas

Own your mistakes

  • Mistakes are part of learning and achieving

  • Verbalize what you learned from your mistakes

    • Models culture of openness and safety to ideas

    • Facilitates ability to quickly course correct

Some behavioral watchouts…

The Multipliers, by Liz Wiseman

  •    🛟  The Rescuer: When a manager helps too soon and too often, starving people of the vital learning they need to be successful, they create a culture of dependence

  • 💯 The Perfectionist – Striving for 100% can land for others as always focusing on the flaws

  • ⏱️ The Pace setter -- When leaders set the pace, they are more likely to create spectators than followers

  • 🔎 The Micromanager – Focused on details, not people. They drive results by holding onto ownership, jumping into the details, and directly managing for results. Instead, be an investor in people.

  • 🦖 The Tyrant – They introduce judgment and fear, which chills people’s best thinking and work. Be a Liberator, producing a climate that is both comfortable and intense