#04 Silos: Transforming Company Culture: A Practical Guide for All Professionals
Fostering Positive Change in Your Team, Regardless of Your Position
Whatever your job title or size of project it can be so frustrating to watch teams working against each other or just not talking.
I invite you to focus on the thing you actually can influence. It is not about telling the CEO to fix the problem. It is about
Taking responsibility,
Being vulnerable and
Cultivating curiosity in your work environment.
That works for CEOs and non-CEOs.
Go first and take responsibility
Start in your team. Your team can mean you have people who report to you or colleagues you work with. You do not need authority to have an impact on company culture. It is like the approach I wrote about to beat slow decision making in large organizations.
If you are the head of the business, map out how you want company culture to be. Develop it with your leadership team. You do this by
Collecting their perspectives,
Choosing what to focus on in the next year,
Creating ideas how to actually do it and
Commiting to experiments and actions for each division.
Show vulnerability
The v-word…! Vulnerability is an important access point to human connection. Human connection form relationships. Relationships is what you need to transform company culture.
It might sound daunting but it is doable. You start with baby steps that feel ok:
Share joy you experienced and describe how it felt, e.g. with a metaphor from sports or your hobby.
Share how another persons thoughts helped you change your mind on a topic.
Be interested in feedback whatever your job title or size of project. Reflect and act on it. Thank the person.
Once you feel comfortable doing this, you can take it one step further. Start acknowledging when you don´t know something or admitting mistakes. You will experience other people doing it, too. You contribute to a change in company culture.
Cultivate curiosity
No matter how great or bad an idea sounds, it can always be improved. Make it a habit to ask even more questions about it.
If you dislike the idea at first, ask even more questions. Aim for finding out why it makes perfect sense from the other persons perspective. ‘What’ and ‘How’ questions will help you and the team member get a clearer understanding and develop next steps.
Real life example
One of my good friends works at a medium size business with mediocre management. There is gossip, envy, loads of frustration and low motivation among staff.
When she started the job she noticed the bad work environment. She did not complain. Instead, she took responsibility and cultivated a supportive team with her direct colleagues. She went first and
shared things she enjoyed,
admitted which tasks she wasn´t good at,
praised other team members for skills she did not have and
supported them with actions that are easy for her.
She never judges but asks questions when she is skeptical about an idea. She dares to follow her gut and, by the way, has no college degree nor does she read leadership books.
You don´t need to be a certain type of person to transform team culture.
This post is part of a series about silo mentality. You can read about other reasons for the existence of silos and what to do about it in the upcoming newsletters.
It covers things that I have seen myself and heard from other corporate employees.
The topics that you have control over will (most likely) be:
🍏 Lack of Collaboration, #01 here
🍏 Different Goals and Objectives, #02 here
🍏 Leadership Style, #03 here
🍏 Company Culture, #04 (this newsletter)
The topics that require involvement from top level management:
🍏 Organizational Structure, #05
🍏 Competition for Resources, #06
Stay tuned!
Very useful, thank you!
Regarding vulnerability, when leaders share their failures/learnings (the right kind of failures) then they are vulnerable and people see them as human beings and that everybody learns in iterations.
It is related to "walk the talk" thing...