Have you ever dreamed of what a great organization culture looks like? Think about it for a minute. Pause for a moment, and write down two or three characteristics of what you think a great culture would look like. Chances are, you wrote down something very positive, probably something of similar behavior. And I also wager that you didn't write down any negative, of a negative culture. Culture is, when we dream about it, are always positive. So we want to think about that as we create our own cultures. At this video you'll be able to appreciate three foundational and positive approaches to creation of a positive culture. You'll also understand key elements of creating a culture of civility as the foundation for a high performing organization. So if you do not proactively create your culture it will create itself. Make sure the culture you have is by design, not be default. That's a quote I like to use quite often in leadership training. So think about when you paused and reflected. That's your first shot at sort of looking at, this is what I want to create is the vision. It's your blue print. It's your blue print for creating a culture. Again, you want to do that. You don't want it to happen to you. So, let's look at some of the mindsets. The first one is the organizational mindset of positive culture. You might have heard the strengths based approach to management in organizations. Is, it gets a lot of play in business literature and in organizations. What this does is it focusses on shifting from a weakness to a strengths mindset. So many times in performance management, we spend a lot of time on fixing weaknesses. And this approach says, let's look at our strengths. How do we look at our strength and make people better and used as more often. And also, looks a leveraging the strengths you have to improve weaknesses. So say I have a strength that’s a good interpersonal skills but I have a weakness why not as good time management. So I can use my interpersonal skills to solicit out people to give me advice and opinions and coaching on good time management. I'm using my strengths to overlay my weaknesses. As a manager what you want to think about is how do I put people in a position to use their strengths more often than not? Appreciative inquiry is another way to look at it. This is a positive approach to management. This one looks at possibilities and solution-focus. So many times we are looking for problems. How do we solve problems? I think as managers many of us are trained to look for problems. This says how do we look at possibilities and solutions. That maybe we haven't imagined because we're too busy looking at problems. It also looks at a thing I call the third alternative approach. Many times we look at a problem and we have two solutions or a solution and we go after it. There's always a third alternative. This approach encourages to look at the best solutions possible for everybody involved. From appreciative inquiry, your focus becomes your reality. So, if you're always looking for problems, that's sort of a negative way to look at things. If we're always looking for solutions, I remember a quote from a song once, there are no problems, only solutions. This is the kind of thing you think about in Appreciative Inquiry. That you're really looking at, we're always looking for ways to do things better. Sort of a continuous improvement mindset. So these two approaches, one is, looking at strengths, leveraging them, put people in a position to do strengths more often, and always looking for possibilities and solutions, rather than always just focusing on the problem. That creates a real nice culture of positivity. From the leadership standpoint is a positive way to view leadership is servant leadership. There's a number of books you can read on this as well. But this really turns the leadership model upside down from as your leader I'm here to tell you what to do. And servant leadership is I'm here to help you get better. Think about that from the performance management process we've talked about. My job is to make people that report to me better. It's not their job to make me happy per se but I'm here to serve you and make you a better employee. One way to do that is using a more influencing style versus coercion. If you coerce people and threaten them you can get compliance but you won't get their minds and hearts and motivation. So look at how do I influence people to perform better, not coerce them. And another piece of the coercion, one that I've often talked about in leadership training, is if I coerce you, you'll do it when I'm there, but you won't necessarily do it in my absence so influencing is a better approach. Abundance versus scarcity. What I mean by this is, as a manager, I have a lot of opportunities to give you opportunities to grow, feedback coaching, I need to look at as an abundance mentality, not that I only have a small amount of compliments and feedback I can give you. Give coaching and feedback generously to help people grow. Then there's value based, as a manager always behave toward your people based on your values. I'm guessing most of you would have a value that says I want to treat my people well. I'm going to go on a limb and think that. Most managing I do, that's in their hearts. But if I go on my feelings I get angry, my decisions are not going to be as good. So always think of that higher value of how I want to treat people and how I want to be known as a manager. That's a values based servant leadership approach. So, let's go back to your leadership blueprint. As a leader, you want to expect and reward civil behavior. Couple of key points here. People perform up to expectations, according to all literature. And when we reward certain behaviors, we get more of it. When we distance that we get less. So as a leader make sure you have high expectations for behavior and reward it accordingly. You also want to have clear norms and communicate expectations. For employees norms are very important. We want to know what is acceptable and what's not. And the clearer your people are on that, the more likely they'll behave that way. And communicate that to all. One of the things, examples I once had is there's a norm that people is simple as pull their weight and were good team members. When they were violated, the team members actually reinforced themselves and they had good communication with each other. That was an expectation of the team that everybody pull their weight. Your norms may be different, but that was the one of this team. A clear vision based on organizational values. We talked about a vision for your organization in profitability and growth and those types of business aspects but you want one for your values as well. And if you're not a, if you're a team leader you want it for your team values too. This goes down to the team level for you as a manager, not just organizational base, so have that clear vision. The other one is being an empowering leader. Many people respond well to empowerment and trust in autonomy. This is part of what it means to be an empowering leader. In along the line of trust, show trust when people are trustworthy, of course. Trust is the highest form of motivation. When people feel that they've violated your trust, they feel bad. People want to live up to expectations and feel trustworthy. These are some things that you should be doing as a manager to create a civil culture, but we reinforce this civil culture as part of your blue print to being a successful manager.
