We carry many unconscious habits and prejudices from our past experiences into our everyday work and family lives.
Creating a set of operating principles for how employees will behave towards each other and those they serve can be the foundation on which a more cohesive, trusting and trustworthy workplace culture can be created. And although giants like Google and Whole Foods Market have created operating principles, no group is too small or too large to take this step. As my article for Leadership Strategies, Inc. emphasizes, operating principles only have power if everyone from the CEO to the newest employee is expected to follow them.
Employees change desks each year for stronger teamwork at Care.com.
In his review of Staying Healthy in Sick Organizations: The Clover Practice™, UK Consultant Philip Whiteley seized on “Declare Your Interdependence.”
Collaboration in Action
We have an opportunity to get up to speed on today’s most pressing leadership and human productivity issues. Human resource leaders in the Madison area are collaborating to offer a day of hot topics as part of a larger conference of the IPMA-HR Central regional conference. This collaborative learning event takes place on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at the Madison Marriott West. (The full IPMA-HR event runs June 6-9.)
Thanks to the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, you can measure for free how well collaboration is going.
It’s an old fashioned approach to think we have to know all the answers before we are willing to communicate with clients, colleagues, customers or stakeholders. Inviting them to contribute to solutions is respectful and appreciative. This open approach is also very likely to shed useful light on the problem itself.
The World Café is a technique for really engaging people in questions and issues that matter to them. It combines doodling or drawing on the table followed by discussion and the opportunity to move to a different table with a different question and another round of writing, drawing and discussion.
Readers share their approaches for saying thank you to colleagues, co-workers, and clients. These suggestions followed the post “The Imperative to Say Thank You.”
This amazing “word cloud” was created by Wordle at http://wordle.net. The site creates customized word clouds from any text that you provide. Words that appear more frequently in the source text show up relatively larger. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The resulting images can be printed, shared on a BLOG. Heck, you can even put the images on T-shirts. You can put your Wordles in the on-line gallery which is open for the universe to see which is why so many of them are anonymous.
My book Staying Healthy in Sick Organizations: The Clover Practice™ launched on Labor Day, 2008. The aim of The Clover Practice™ is greater peace of mind and reduced stress.
The Clover Practice™ comes from my 20-plus years as a management consultant and, like a clover, consists of three principles:
All three of these principles are simple, but not easy to live. If peace of mind is the aim, we need to be truthful even when it’s not convenient and even when we don’t look too good. White lies even compromise our integrity and the degree to which others trust us. This doesn’t mean we say everything that comes to mind. We don’t have to share our opinions on everything. They are just our opinions, after all, and not eternal truths.
A friend invited me to her new home today to see the place and to enjoy lunch outside on the patio. The conversation turned to her experience working as holiday help for a department store. She described a communication encounter with a supervisor that still stings even though it took place several years back. She was helping a customer with a large order and was not in the location her supervisor expected to find her.