I reckon this is a cracking explanation of team dynamics and culture… it has somewhat evolved over the years… Enjoy!
Team or Organisational Culture.. What is it and How does it grow?
Firstly the ‘What’…
Your team culture is essentially the internalised beliefs that exists in sufficient numbers of your team members, for those beliefs to become reality – or at least, perceived reality.
Organisational or Team Culture ought to be centred around ‘What the organisation stands for’ and ‘What it won’t stand for’ and… how consistently it upholds both.
However… some organisations have their culture based on non truths – half truths or perhaps dead-but-kept-artificially-alive truths…
How does this happen?
Well here’s a popular story that fundamentally explains how non-truths can become your reality and subsequently, part of your organisational culture…
A some-what mad Scientist (let’s give him the traditional white coat and crazed white hair) places 5 monkeys into a cage. Also in the cage he places a tall ladder and on the very top of the ladder he puts a bunch of bananas.
As you would expect it isn’t long before one of the monkeys begins to scurry up the rungs.
However when he’s barely half way up, the Scientist blasts the unsuspecting monkey off the ladder with ice-cold high-pressure water and then saturates the other 4, causing them all to retreat to a corner of the cage…
A few minutes later, a different monkey tries his luck at retrieving the bananas, only to have the same cold shower blast over him and his simian buddies.
Now it doesn’t take too many more times before not one of these monkeys dare climb the ladder or go anywhere near it, despite the delicious fruit being enticingly close.
With this achieved, the Scientist removes one of the monkeys from the cage, takes him to a back room where selects a new chimp from this back room and places him the in cage with the others.
As expected, this new guy instinctively races up the ladder towards the bananas. But before he makes it up 3 rungs (and without any water being sprayed), the other 4 monkeys drag him down and beat the living daylights out of him. Confused and battered, this new money retreats to his own corner, convinced to not do that again!
Intermittently over the next few days, the Scientist replaces the remaining original 4 monkeys one by one, with a new monkey. Each time these newly added chimps attempted to climb the ladder, they too were dragged down by the others and subjected to a serious belting…
So eventually, this was the scenario. The Scientist now had a cage with 5 monkeys, none of whom had any first hand experience of the cold water consequence, yet none of them dared go near the ladder, let alone the bananas….!
Now imagine if we could actually ask these monkeys some questions and solicit their responses…
“Why don’t you guys climb up to get the fruit”?
They would likely respond along the lines of…
“No one here touches the bananas. We stay OFF the ladder!!!”
“Why”? we would would ask.
“…’cause… something bad happens…”
“Like what”? we would push.
“(long pause) Ummm, not sure... But we just don’t do it!”
So here comes the likely clear point to the story… If your organisation has some non-truths, or perhaps past truths e.g. if the company used to ‘blast monkeys off ladders’ many years ago, but that story was still being shared as reality today; when new team members started but weren’t given a better and/or more accurate ‘truth’ about your organisation, they would invariably buy into whatever belief had sufficient momentum, thereby further fuelling that reality and giving it life….
How do you counter these non-truths? Firstly, the girl or guy at the helm may want to acknowledge and apologise for (whether it was them or not) any aspects that may have been true in the past. And then begin conversations and ask questions around what the team actually experiences now…
Then, document & discuss these Actual and/or perhaps Ideal truths (things like company standards, values, policies, purpose etc). Then, be sure to review and challenge these new realities with your teams Passionately, Collaboratively and Frequently – lastly, hold yourself and everyone else accountable to these ‘best-practices’.
And whilst this change is unlikely to occur in a few days, it doesn’t take as long as you might think… When sufficient numbers of your team hear and moreover, see the actual truth in play, old truths soon lose their traction. And if a few past-dwellers attempt to keep the dying stories alive (some people can’t help themselves), without the buy-in from others, those few loose their previously vast influence.
Ultimately, your ‘organisational truth’ will be based on demonstrable reality – not on gossip and ‘populist’ stories – meaning your existing and newly hired people will be continually ‘re-infected’ by a far healthier culture…
Your’s in engaged staff and loyal customers
Jeff Austin
jeff@actualtoideal.com.au
http://ift.tt/2aQIg3s
from The Print Shop Bunbury | Offset Digital Commercial Printing http://ift.tt/2bJGo1C
from The Print Shop Bunbury http://ift.tt/2bt6AOH
No comments:
Post a Comment