Most of us have been trained to hide our true feelings and do things in spite of them for fear of appearing unprofessional. There’s certainly a need to manage our emotions so that we can be professional. But there’s also a need to experience and be conscious of our feelings so that we can be skillful, intuitive, effective leaders.

When I’m helping clients through difficulties, whether it’s internal or external challenges, there’s usually a series of consecutive steps we take together. I call it the Leading Spirit Success Cycle, for obvious reasons. What this cycle represents is the idea that success can happen in any situation; it’s always possible to create something new and different no matter how big the mess.

“Team culture” is the difference between loving your work and hating it. It’s the difference between a healthy environment in which a group thrives and a sickly atmosphere that directly impacts the bottom line. In “Reactive” team cultures there’s avoidance, scapegoating, turf protection, communication breakdowns and other “triggered” behaviors that don’t serve the team or organization. As coaches and trainers, our job is to help organizations develop healthy, synergistic teams that produce skyrocketing results.

Many work cultures have unconsciously normalized multitasking during meetings, making it easy to avoid direct communication. Ask your team what works about multitasking during meetings, and what are the costs? What guidelines does the team want to make for technology use during meetings?

We live in an age of incredible technologies that make the world vastly smaller and more interconnected. Social networking platforms such as Twitter continue to find important new roles and applications. For example, the depth of information available regarding post-election events in Iran is inextricably linked not to mainstream media or state spokespersons, but to the thousands of young people posting ’round-the-clock updates via Twitter and other online forums.

When you have low conflict, you often also have little trust. That doesn’t mean there’s no one within the organization who’s trustworthy. It just means no one has had the opportunity to earn or gain trust. With the organization described in Part 1 of this post, things had been so casual and conflict-free that they hadn’t struggled through tough decisions in a way that builds trust among team members. So, that’s part of what we did with leadership and staff: build trust. As a result of that work, their trust level for one another was ultimately much higher, which was much more healthy for the organization.

When there’s differences of opinion within an organization, often that’s pictured as knockdown, blowout arguments between strong-willed individuals. That happens. But as we noted in our last post, agreement-based organizations suffer from “safeness” and “niceness” every bit as much as angry conflict. Yet for some reason, this softer side of the problem is rarely discussed.

In alignment-based organizations, diverse voices are valued. There’s creativity, innovation and trust because people can comfortably speak their mind. They can have disagreements about how to do something or what to do next because they’re all aligned around a common purpose and clear understanding.

In agreement-based organizations, creativity is stifled and fear of “breaking the rules” or “rocking the boat” runs rampant. Staffers play it safe around conflict, which can be just as damaging as tearing each other’s eyes out. Teams, departments and staffers don’t work together well, and the organization as a whole suffers greatly.

The choice seems pretty obvious, so how do you create and sustain an alignment-based organization?

A large percentage of change initiatives fail … and fail miserably. That’s why it’s so important to provide strategic resources for support. The good news is after more than 30 years of looking at change management and change theory, there’s a lot more data and research to tell us why success or failure happens.
So in [...]