Questions to ask yourself about culture at work

“We take really good care of our employees but how do we help them with their will power, their motivation? I don’t actually know what they are up to during the day. As a distributed team, I can see what they have scheduled on the calendar, but I worry they aren’t organized or disciplined enough at home to do their work.”

These are some of the concerns I’ve heard lately.

These team leads want to support their teams to become empowered, enthusiastic, hard working, and proactive under their leadership. They earnestly want this, but struggle to find the right approach between the vertical power dynamic of being the decision maker and responsible for outcomes, and the horizontal playing field of relationships, collaboration, and being humans together.

I have yet to meet anyone who has this completely figured out. Largely I think because it’s a dynamic balance, and requires specific personal capacity from leadership to hold this space in a healthy and inspired way.

The way I see it, humanity is collectively crossing the rubicon where we really can’t continue to deploy an industrial era mindset with humans as mere cogs in a giant wheel. We’ve seen the rise in the behemoth of HR to control, coerce, manage, and contain miserable, resentful people. But HR doesn’t seem to solve the growing problems with employees, only exacerbate them.

Am I right?

So how do we manage this conflict between vertical and horizontal leadership dynamics? How do we humanize the work space, without losing discipline and accountability?

I see this in three layers, and these are the questions I’m living with as I attune to the teams I have been working with lately here in America and abroad:

Layer 1, the relational space: 

• What kinds of attempts have already been made to support and grow capacity for team work?
• what kinds of social agreements, if any, are present in how people treat each other?
• What kinds of behaviors are tolerated, even though they are clearly toxic such as defensiveness, blaming, stonewalling, or outright contempt?
• Are there any skills or knowledge present for how to communicate in more respectful, collaborative, and generative ways?
• Does the team have any facilitation skills? How do they manage conflict and disagreements?

What do I already anticipate? That the “soft skills” part of getting along are severely lacking in most, if not all, team work.

Is this harsh? Maybe, but an ordinary level of soft skills is totally inadequate for creating a socially regenerative team practice with a high quota of emotional intelligence playing out consistently. This requires training and practice if you are lucky enough to get it, and even luckier if your team mates also do.

The next questions will explain why.

Layer 2, individual discipline and purpose: 

• Are people fragile? Can they handle hearing that their work is falling short of carefully thought-through protocols such as legal compliance, or basic bookkeeping? In other words, are they holding themselves accountable via their own inner standards and values, independently held? Or are they both reliant upon  and resentful of others holding them accountable? Or worse?
• Are people willing to learn how to communicate better, and how to do team work better? These are skills that have to be learned; they aren’t typically modeled at home nor throughout our lengthy education journey — which is a big shame considering how important such skills are to getting the work done.
• Are people willing to engage in group practices of accountability and support? For instance, a daily stand-up call (from Agile) to share the tasks of that day, and progress on goals for the week?
• Are people able to find meaning and purpose in their job, and I mean in the daily grind of the job? Do they see that motivation arises from a will fired by the warmth of enthusiasm and sense of a greater mission? Or do they experience chronic resistance and struggle because they find their work meaningless? This question can also reveal things about structural and leadership-driven impediments to the quality of the social fields — culture — at work.
• How willing are they to engage with personal development opportunities to help improve their lives at work and grow a more supportive culture together?

It is a two way street; if individuals at work are willing to engage with these areas of soft skills development, then collectively there is a fighting chance of making a really lovely culture at work. If not, then you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make her drink (I know this because my horse had a mind of her own, just as we humans do). You can invite people to engage with opportunities that are provided, but in this area of life — the inner world of the individual — we must leave each other free to choose a path of growth, or not. Otherwise we are no better than HR, or social engineering.

Layer 3: the organization’s culture:

• Where are the passive aggressive behaviors and outcomes playing out? I find that the shadow side of culture in an organization plays out also in passive aggression, meaning, they inadvertently or unconsciously sabotage through forgetfulness, too many sick days, not finding the discipline to check their work sufficiently, “quiet quitting”, checking out psychically, shutting down, etc. Because passive aggression tends to be somewhat unconsciously done, it can be the hardest to find a solution for. Companies hemorrhage money due to passive aggressive employees who know they are merely cogs in an inhuman wheel of roles, HR, fear-based leadership, and now the increasing threat of being replaced by A.I.
• What appetite does the leadership have to address these issues from the standpoint of the inner life? Are they looking for solutions from A.I. and data? Or are they aware that humans are not machines to be “fixed” by such limiting and external determinants arising from behaviorism? The organizational culture is limited by the capacity in the leaders to see the cast of their own shadows and tendencies. Seeing how their limits play out across the organization requires an unusual level of self-reflection. That said, there is a lot that managers can accomplish for and with their teams with only a modicum of support from their leaders.

These questions are not definitive, but just places to start. They help me see where to intervene first.

What do you notice going on at work when it comes to soft skills and their presence or absence? Let me know in the comments below.