Leaders set the tone for their organisations. Across time, a diverse cast of staff, volunteers, and members develop unwritten expectations. Organisational culture can be a powerful tool in the hands of a leader, or actually an anchor, slowing every effort to move forward. To create vibrant organisations, leaders must develop and maintain more functional work cultures that are positive, adaptable and effective.
One recommendation comes from marriage and family therapists, who for decades have employed the phrase "elephants in the living room" to describe weighty issues that everybody knows about but nobody wants to talk about. By acknowledging the elephants in a family, such as addiction and anger, family members can learn to make more positive choices.
Effective leaders encourage employees to communicate in open, constructive ways and to hold others accountable to do the same.
In organisations, the elephants can be for example gossip, mediocrity, or negative politics. Left unchecked, these elephants disrupt even the best organisations. They undermine a leader's ability to implement change and drain the joy from the employees' workdays.
Moving these elephants out of the workplace takes skill and emotional intelligence. Leaders possessing these traits can apply a three-part strategy to clean them out and create a more positive, energizing workplace:
Here are some ways to apply these strategies to deal with three of the biggest organizational elephants: toxic gossip, entrenched mediocrity, and negative politics.
When new leaders take the helm of an association, team members experience a natural sense of anxiety. Expectations change, strategies evolve, and uncertainty displaces familiar ways of working. Individuals who lack healthy communication skills sometimes act out their insecurities in nonproductive ways, such as through toxic gossip. Rather than take positive action to address their needs, gossipers waste time and energy discussing the shortcomings of others, often in hushed hallway conversations.
As Joseph Telushkin, author of Words That Hurt, Words That Heal: How to Choose Words Wisely and Well, observes: "The most important reason we gossip is to raise our status by lowering the status of others." Unfortunately, gossip undermines precious interpersonal trust among team members — trust that leaders need to move an association forward. To overcome this challenge, effective leaders encourage employees to communicate in open, constructive ways and to hold others accountable to do the same.
Dick Peterson, president of the Northeast Agriculture Technology Corporation, dealt with organizational cultures in both large and small associations, experience complemented by 30 years as a manager with New York State Electric and Gas. In the 1980s, he observed members spreading gossip in an attempt to undermine proposals being considered by the board. To deal with the gossipers, Peterson pulled them aside privately to ask, "What's the problem?" and "How can we solve it?" By modeling openness and a tone of consideration and giving the gossipers the benefit of the doubt, Peterson depersonalized the issues. Once the lines of communication were opened, everyone could move toward a problem-solving approach.
"Sometimes a person has a legitimate issue but needs a more constructive way to raise it", noted Peterson. By beginning your exchange in a diplomatic, nonjudgmental way, the gossiper is less likely to get defensive or sabotage the conversation. Such conversations can become teachable moments — opportunities to coach others on direct ways of expressing themselves. By engaging the gossiper in the solution, Peterson modeled a more artful approach to open communication while bolstering the individual's sense of control in solving the problem.
In addition to engaging and equipping employees, leaders have the prerogative to set clear expectations regarding workplace behaviors. When leaders encourage team members to agree on the ground rules and to hold each other accountable for those agreements, individuals will often choose better behaviors rather than face the wrath of the team. When a person continues to cause problems, even after agreeing to the team's standards, he or she probably does not buy in to the values of the organization. That kind of values conflict is difficult, if not impossible, for leaders to resolve.
Nancy Caballero, program manager for Workshop in Business Opportunities (WIBO) in New York City, suggested that leaders tackle such situations on a case-by-case basis. "If an incident is a one-time thing, in the heat of the moment, you can overlook it. But when behavior becomes a consistent pattern, it may mean that the individual is simply not on board. " A lot of times when people are making noise, management instinctively pushes them away. We do the opposite," she said. " Almost as you would with children, you pull them closer." This lets them know that you are listening.
Through his various roles, Peterson of the Northeast Agriculture Technology Corporation observed that organisations are sometimes slow to adapt to changing business conditions. When an organisation begins to accept mediocrity in the work of staff and volunteers, lackluster organisational performance surely follows. "In the business world, change happens rapidly. [...] While some smaller [organisations] are very agile and creative, getting a larger [organisation] moving in a new direction can be a real challenge." That challenge is particularly tough when leaders must raise the bar of professional standards for staff in response to more demanding marketplace realities. Peterson advocated a high-involvement approach to overcoming organisational inertia.
Firstly, leaders must create a team of their own, composed of experienced members with whom they enjoy working, explained Peterson. That core group can help win the support of detractors. Second, he added that "While it seems easier to go ahead and do things yourself rather than ask other members to get involved, as soon as people get the impression that you are a 'one-man show,' you lose your support base."
He felt that unfortunately, traditional governance models rely heavily on senior members; "We need the expertise of long-time people along with the energy of young people with new ideas."
However, leaders should not be surprised to encounter some resistance when asking staff, volunteers, and members to get off the sidelines and take responsibility for problem solving. In truth, most of us become uncomfortable when someone tells us that we have to meet higher expectations. Researcher Edward L. Deci has studied cognitive evaluation theory, the process by which people instinctively weigh the costs and benefits of taking action. He wrote: "CET asserts that [people's] underlying intrinsic motivations are the psychological needs for autonomy and competence." Initiatives to raise standards of excellence erode workers' sense of competence and autonomy and their sense of security in their roles. But leaders can take steps to rebuild team members' sense of competence and autonomy and to make raising the bar much more palatable.
For example, according to Caballero, the logistics of the events she was producing needed improvement. To stimulate some fresh ideas, she asked the staff and volunteers organising the events to view the stage from the perspective of the audience. By inviting team members to look at things differently, with an openness to trying new approaches, Caballero earned the commitment of the team to making positive changes in the graduation program without calling into question their competence.
Now WIBO makes employee involvement a core expectation. To demonstrate trust in the team, WIBO engages staff in developing and executing the organisation's strategic plan. That action sends a strong message that leadership believes in the team's ability to both identify opportunities to improve results and offer workable solutions. "People are expected to contribute ideas. They are expected to look at their jobs and make recommendations about how they can do them better", noted Caballero. During the annual goal-setting process at WIBO, all staff are expected to list what they think should be accomplished within their areas as well as for the organization as a whole.
One outcome of this has been the creation of a volunteer advisory council to create and refine the goals for the workshop and for volunteer contributions. Caballero commented: "So far, the change in attitude has been more enthusiasm for the workshop and more participation from staff sharing more of their time. By having higher expectations for the workshop, staff increase their performance based on our example."
Asking staff to take a more active role also stimulated cultural change at WIBO. "It was difficult at first, but once the process was under way, people were happier", said Caballero. As a result, the strategic plan has become their plan, not leadership's plan. Along with a sense of ownership has followed a greater commitment to making the strategic plan happen, as evidenced by WIBO's results. "Our events are getting progressively better. Our volunteers have higher standards and the entrepreneurs we serve are getting great material", said Caballero.
Politics are part of the job for leaders, who get things done by influencing others, building support and focusing the association's energy, attention, and resources on the mission. Each of those responsibilities is political in nature. But when politics degenerate into negative politics, organisational unity and collective effort get torn into pieces. Peterson noted: "When vocal subgroups try to change the tenor of the organisation to meet their specific needs, factions begin to form. Rather than listening to each other, the sides reinforce and more deeply entrench their positions. Debate becomes non-constructive."
Common examples of negative politics in organisations include withholding key information that could be helpful to a co-worker, using body language that discounts others in a meeting, and saying one thing in the presence of a team member but saying something different behind the scenes.
Effective leaders work through good-faith differences of opinion by fostering open dialogue. But, as Peterson noted, leaders must really listen. "It takes honest engagement, not just lip service. Consider issues honestly, and address them if possible." To put that good intention into action, the American Society of Agricultural Engineers for instance invested heavily in surveys to take the pulse of the membership and in communication to keep people informed about the decision-making process. " When people feel heard, they are far more willing to sign on and support the decisions of the national leadership ", noted Peterson.
Sheree Parris Nudd, Vice President of the Washington Adventist Hospital in Maryland overcame politics by bringing people together to jointly solve problems and by modeling the behavior she wants to see in others. "To get the ball rolling, I have been known to say, 'OK, let's talk about the elephant in the room' as a way to broach formerly taboo topics, such as interdepartmental conflict and abrasive team-member behaviors. [...] Sometimes all it takes to diffuse negative politics is one leader with the guts to break the ice and get the dialogue rolling", Nudd observed.
Often, employees simply require some concerted coaching and attention to become comfortable communicating in more constructive ways.
When coaching a young supervisor Nudd first instructed to observe her while she conducted several performance-improvement meetings. Then she let the supervisor
guide the meetings while she was observing. After a couple of times working through the process, the supervisor was ready to lead those
discussions on her own, with some role-playing beforehand to get comfortable with the words.
Nudd also helped team members practice how to give and receive feedback; " By practicing the words, they learn to be more comfortable and less self-conscious
when the time comes to deal with real conflict."
When a leader is open to direct, non-defensive dialogue, employees are less likely to pay attention to hearsay from unreliable sources. Nudd also routinely set aside "no agenda" time in her staff meetings and asked open-ended questions to encourage employees to talk about their concerns.
Caballero believed that moving from negative politics to positive discussion begins in the heart of the leader. Soon after joining WIBO, Caballero wasn't connecting well with a key volunteer, who rejected her efforts to communicate by phone or e-mail. "Finally, when I met with him in person, we discovered a completely new and better interaction. He was not in favor of automated technology and helped me see how a personal interaction could be so much more of a rich and real experience. After that meeting, we got along fine", said Caballero, who believed an attitude of trust and respect for others allows for a spirit of collaboration.
Keep the elephants away!
Creating lasting change begins with a leadership mind-set that believes in the potential of all team members to be responsible, professional performers. By setting clear expectations, engaging and involving the team, and equipping people to become responsible, leaders transform the cultures of their organisations. They can maintain this momentum by consistently modeling positive alternatives to negative habits. When the whole team agrees to hold each other accountable for new behaviors, they make the changes stick.
Leading this type of cultural change requires guts, skills, and tenacity. Leaders should invest in strategies to constantly clean up the mess that organisational elephants leave behind and to keep them away.
Expect, engage, and equip your team to clean out the elephants and keep them out for good.based on work by Gene C. Mage — Making It Work, Horseheads
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