Think Emotional Culture
Do you know what the emotional culture is in your organization? Have you found a way to measure it? In my work I focus on helping people to manage their own emotions and to influence the emotions of others on an organizational, team, and individual level.
What are you currently doing to influence your teams emotional culture? As the overall leader of an entire organization, a division, a team, or even as a team member, you all have the ability to make a difference on the degree people feel engaged. I use a series of tools to get this done. The key is my Emotion Roadmap which I have written about before. Essentially it embodies four key questions that help you move from existing feelings to feelings that are more ideal.
To understand how to use my model with engagement you want to consider what causes people to feel engaged. What makes people typically feel excited to be going to work and what types of situations, circumstances, behaviours and so forth result in apathy, or even active disengagement.
Key to understanding is that there are some common feelings that drive engagement to high levels. These are feelings like respect, belonging, pride, support, valued, appreciated and so forth. How do we know what some groups within our organizations are feeling? Is there a way to assess our team members’ feelings. Assessment types vary. One particularly helpful tool I use with clients is an Emotional Culture Survey created by my colleague Ben Palmer and his organization, Genos.
Here is a real-life example of using this Emotional Culture Survey to create an organization profile of the emotional experience of an organization I have been working with for several years. The owner and CEO is an outstanding leader who has paid close attention to how she wants her employees to feel.
These particular feelings that identified in the following image were created with the organizations’ leaders. Together, the owner and I decided to work with her managers to customize the selected feelings based on what they felt would be most valuable to measure. The assessment allows customization and choices of what pleasant and unpleasant feelings are most important to measure. Also, by empowering the managers and select others to help create the list of emotions we worked with, we built ownership among the team.
In a project of this nature, where you are looking to assess existing emotions, you need to understand what is happening to make people feel the way they do. For the positive emotions rated very high in a good way, you want to dive deeper to make sure you know what is so highly valued by the team members. At the same time, it is equally important to understand any frustrations, stress, anxiety that is particularly unhealthy, and then of course to plan how to deal with any that are ongoing and possibly toxic.
While an assessment of this type does capture a moment in time, you can easily repeat the assessment as often as you deem reasonable. The key to any assessment though is what happens once you have the results. In other organizations where I have measured engagement, the results are often quite different, and not nearly as positive. In my consulting I use the Emotion Roadmap as an emotion-based problem-solving tool to create the sought after positive changes leading to higher levels of engagement. Here is the current state of the Emotional Culture Index of the entire staff.
These results are very positive and a tribute to the leadership of the owner and her managers. To better understand these results it is important to note that the words describing these emotions had definitions we created together with the managers and some additional respected and influential team members. Defining the emotions makes sure that people have a similar idea of what is meant when you write the word engaged, or productive, and so forth. Here are several examples of how we defined the emotions we used in the diagram.
- Productive – take initiative and feel responsible, committed, focused, and accountable for goal achievement.
- Empowered – feel encouraged, motivated and inspired by being allowed to control what I do and by receiving growth opportunities when all goals are met and exceeded.
- Engaged – feel interested, curious, trusted, trusting, meaningful, and fulfilled.
- Anxious – feel nervous, stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted, sad, and fearful.
It is also important to understand why people feel the way they do. Here are two examples of written comments shared as part of the assessment exercise.
Helpful
Feeling like I belong and am valued creates a positive workplace in which I am more productive. It helps me stay focused and allows me to do the best job possible. I care about what I am doing here and strive to do everything I can to contribute to the success of the company.
Unhelpful
Anxious: Sometimes I feel I need to know more about my job duties and responsibilities. I know upper management is super busy so at times you feel like you’re educating yourself.
There are times when the solution to unwanted feelings can be addressed directly by the use of the Emotion Roadmap. For example, if a manager or supervisor knows that he or she is likely to be super busy for a period of time, and will not be available for providing detailed explanations regarding their team members duties and responsibilities, they might choose to pick someone out of their group who is experienced and knowledgeable and ask that they become the go to person for anyone with questions. And even here a supervisor needs to be thoughtful about how they assign a role like this. If they simply say “I am busy. I need you to answer questions for the next two weeks so I am giving everyone your name.” And that’s it. It is possible this will be viewed as extra work with no additional pay and a somewhat unpleasant experience.
But if you focus on “how” you want this talented and knowledgeable employee to feel, by using the Emotion Roadmap, you might say “Look Mary, I know everyone is busy, including me, and there are going to be people who may need answers from me and I will not have the time to give them. I want you to know, I trust you, and respect your knowledge, and I am willing to tell people, when I am not available, trust Mary, she knows what to do! Are you okay with that?”
The difference you want to make with people, to make sure they feel “engaged”, is to make sure they feel appreciated, respected, valued and trusted!
