When it comes to team building and organizational development, culture trumps strategy every time!
Culture is palpable. It’s made up of the attitudes of the people, their feelings, thoughts and quality of relationships. Culture can be felt, perceived and experienced through our senses and intuitive or inner knowing and is expressed through body language, vocal quality and in the way people conduct themselves. How they feel about their jobs, their co-workers, their boss, their workplace may give rise to workplace stress and effect attendance, performance and the quality of results they generate.
Motivation is at the heart of a culture. It defines how you feel about what you do and influences how you sustain your passion and commitment. Organizational culture gives rise to a climate that creates the conditions for either growth, change or stagnation.
There are two different forms of motivation critical to goal attainment. Identified motivation reflects the importance and meaning an individual assigns to a goal. It helps you maintain your focus on your goal which helps you generate the energy needed for effort to pursue your goal when faced with challenges, constraints or boredom. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is derived from the activity for the sake of itself with little or no value placed on external rewards.
Fit is Key
Where passion is aligned with purpose, workers build courage and conviction valuable in confronting fear and uncertainty and contribute to a workplace culture of high integrity, creativity and innovation.
Workplace coaching can help managers and their teams understand the forms and attributes of motivation and the environmental fit required to enable the worker to leverage their inherent passion and achieve desired goals in the workplace.
Emotional Engagement Drives Employee Effort
Engaged workers are those who work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. Engaged workers drive innovation and move the organization forward
Not engaged workers are essentially checked-out. They’re sleepwalking through their work, putting in time but not energy or passion
Actively disengaged workers are just unhappy at work. They are busy acting out their unhappiness. These workers may undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish.
Burnout, is a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion. Chronic daily stresses rather than unique critical life events are regarded as central factors in producing burnout.
To build teams and develop an organization from within, we must first assess the state of organizational culture to know where we’re at.
Organizational Culture Diagnostic
I use a very simple diagnostic tool that helps my clients identify the cause at the root of the problem. This assessment gives us the insight we need to focus our efforts. This diagnostic tool proposes that a culture of trust is the critical success factor for employee engagement which is fundamental to organizational growth. How to create a culture of trust is a function of leadership. Effective leaders are those who learn how to create a climate and culture where trust pervades human interactions to create favourable conditions for employee commitment.
Visionary leaders step forward with vision, capability and credibility to inspire hope for a better future.
It is the responsibility of the leader to share their vision, inspire others to embrace their values; clarify roles and relationships; define standards of agreement and ensure “fit” by putting the right people in the right roles.
“Leadership, as Peter Senge said, is deeply personal and inherently collective. That’s a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace. It does depend on them. It does depend on their convictions, their clarity, their personal commitment to their own cultivation. And on the other hand, it doesn’t depend on them. It’s an inherently collective phenomenon.”
While it is the role of the leader to set direction, control rate of growth, model values and inspire commitment; a leadership process provides the governance framework for the manager to manage the resources of time, personnel and money to achieve the agreed-upon goals. When leadership presence, process and practice are lacking, managers may confuse leadership and management and assume authority where they have none; creating employee confusion and a culture of discontent.
Insightful leaders, recognize that leadership is more than a role. Leadership is a process that entails a sound set of leadership practices to be sustainable.
Enlightened leaders recognize how working with a professional coach can help them develop leadership practices. Practices that help them cultivate an authentic and mindful leadership presence and become increasingly effective in leading themselves, their organizations and their people in creating synergy through right relationships between the many diverse stakeholders involved in their enterprise, for the good of the whole.
Enlightened leaders know that improving their organizations begins with improving themselves – a conscious process of transforming deep personal energies into extraordinary interpersonal results and recognize the value of executive and leadership coaching to help them become the leader they want to be.
This article was first published in the October 2013 edition of Worldwide Coaching Magazine
About Julia von Flotow
