Energize & engage your workplace
Here’s the overview of the last part of my book: “Positive Power at Work – How to make a positive difference from any position.” Are you able, willing and ready to be a Positive Agent? This part about “WE” focuses on the team and the organization. How can you create a culture where people thrive and achieve shared goals? How …
Now we get to the last part of this positive power series, where we focus on the whole organization. So far, we have seen Interaction Interventions that you can deploy individually or with a few other Positive Agents to influence your group or organization. The motto of Interaction Interventions is: If you want to go fast, travel alone… (and you …
Letting go is vital for cultures, leaders, employees, and organizations. Without letting go, organizations whither away due to micro-management. Too much control stifles engagement, agility, innovation, collaboration, responsibility, and so on! It’s dangerous. Ricardo Semler One of the most provocative and inspiring initiators of letting go of control is Ricardo Semler. In 1982, he took over his father’s company Semco …
Learning is crucial for a positive culture, but it hardly ever happens without mistakes, hickups, or failures. Learning fast, and learning from others’ failures as well, helps your organization become more agile and better. In conventional cultures, however, it’s not common to admit failures even though failure is critical to success. In nuclear plant accidents, the NASA Challenger disaster and …
In this blog, I’ve been reviewing many small, personal ways to contribute to a more positive culture at work. But what if you want to engage your whole organization? In that case, a culture survey might be a good starting point. It helps to map where you are now and where you would like to go and start the conversation. …
When was the last time you learned something new? Being a newbie again, can be a wonderful experience. People who thrive have a sense of learning and vitality, as Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath found. Flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi showed, is the state where you are challenged and learn, but though there is a “stretch” you are not challenged beyond …
You probably know the story of three masons chipping chunks of granite from large blocks. When a bypasser asked what they were doing, the first Mason said: “I’m cutting stones”. The second man replied: “I am building a wall.” The third, who was humming a tune as he worked, smiled, “I am building a cathedral!” Job, career, or calling? That …
Do you need more engagement and positive, constructive ideas? A dialogue to tap into the collective intelligence of a large department or organization can be done in a World Cafe, developed by Juanita Brown and others. The World Cafe engages people around a central theme and helps them connect and learn. Like all great things, it’s simple but can be …
Positive cultures lead to productivity and can even stir high performance or “positive deviance”. How could you make that work? People perform best when they feel good about themselves, plus: when they know what they must do and what the criteria are. Clarity Though rather simple, this is explained in The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. …
Today, let’s focus on developing a positive, productive culture from a leading position, so you can involve more others than as an individual positive agent. How could you work with your team or organization? Invite By involving – I mean inviting others. A positive, productive culture is built on intrinsic motivation and its energy. People contribute because they are energized …
Do you need your team or organization to be more innovative, agile, productive, and engaging? Then helping them develop a more positive culture is something to seriously consider. But wait a minute. Wouldn’t that require a huge culture program? Well, maybe not! What if you could start small, and today? Research and practice show that Interaction Interventions influence your team …
If you really want a positive culture and extraordinary meetings, I recommend the Liberating Structures (LS), developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. LS focus on changing routine habits of interaction and the culture will be influenced organically. LS are “microstructures” that shape your conversations and meetings. They may seem small but have a big impact. Old-fashioned micro-structures The five …
