Workplace Culture Blog Posts
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Spending trust means leaning into the things we tend to avoid: conflict, disagreement, feedback, and accountability.
Systems thinking is a powerful tool for managers. It helps us move beyond simplistic, linear thinking to understand the complex, interconnected nature of our organizations.
Today, we're diving into the feels – both yours and your employee's – and how to handle them like the emotionally intelligent leader you are (or aspire to be).
Here's the deal: setting clear expectations is not just about making the workday smoother; it's about creating an environment where people can thrive and want to stay.
The true challenge of any training or development initiative lies in keeping the momentum going.
It’s crucial to understand that cultivating a psychologically safe environment does not equate to an unhealthy leniency in terms of behaviors, processes, or outcomes.
Engage in heated, free-for-all debates that often lead nowhere or consider using a version of the IMAGO conversation process. This approach ensures that everyone's opinions are heard and understood fully.
When skillfully harnessed, conflict emerges as a catalyst for positive transformations: a forge where creativity is kindled, decisions are refined, and bonds are fortified.
Delve into specific mindsets that individuals and teams can adopt to change their perception of conflict and handle it in a way that yields positive team outcomes.
When team members are able to stay relationally engaged in the midst of conflict (regardless of outcomes), they tend to walk away feeling respected and empowered, instead of drained and angry.
Although the idea of “quiet quitting” is now in vogue, it’s not new; many people have been silently skating by for years.
It sucks to consistently have critical job duties get pushed into the evenings and weekends because you’re spending a lot of the regular work hours in meetings.
You’re wondering who should be in each meeting, are you? Tough question! The answer to this question is circumstantial. But here’s the thing - big meetings make people sad.
Change management is an art – we must help people work through the resistance so they can accept and embrace change.
If you want to improve engagement, the best place to start is to improve your leadership culture.
In a healthy leadership team all leaders, from supervisors to executives, are singing off the same sheet of music with best-practice leadership and management behaviors.
It’s important to keep in mind that when we give someone corrective or critical feedback, it will likely trigger a "fear response" in that person. Here’s how to mitigate that defensiveness.
Change. We all resist it on some level, whether the change in question is good for us or not. This resistance to change can be the bane of an organization’s existence.
Four immediately actionable ways (as in, you can do these today or tomorrow) you as a manager can create psychological safety with your team members…and why you should.
Feeling defensive is human. It’s a manifestation of a fear response that takes place in our amygdala fear and triggers our “fight, flight, or freeze” instincts.
Managing others well involves a specific set of best-practice, tried-and-true management skills. We’ve narrowed them down to what we call “The Top 15 Management Skills” based on years of observing managers and following the research.
Employees just want to know if they’re influencing, deciding, or neither. They’re usually OK with whichever one it is.
The SCARF model gives us insight on how to intentionally engineer the work environment so employees feel safe to bring their best, authentic selves to work every day.
We’ve seen organizational cultures truly damaged by workplace negativity, and often the leaders in these companies have no idea of the source or even the nature of the problem.
When they’re done right, remote meetings can foster an environment of connection and collaboration where stuff gets done. When they’re done poorly, they can really suck.
Some of us have been managing remote teams for years, but for many this is a brand new experience. Here are some quick and easy(ish) practices and tips to help you set your remote team up for success.
The only thing worse than a poorly run meeting is a poorly run meeting filled with people who are behaving poorly. So how do you get people to bring their best selves to meetings? Here are a few tips.
Meetings are a microcosm of the broader organization’s culture, which leads to a piece of really good news: In many ways you can actually reverse engineer an organization’s culture by improving their meetings!
Building trust and respect in the workplace is a layered, complicated, and nuanced process. A great starting point is teaching your team to recognize the differences in the way people show up and the qualities (and otherwise) each behavior style brings to the workplace.
Being a good coach and being a good manager involves a very similar set of skills. In our modern workforce, being a good manager means you have to be a good coach.