As coaches and trainers, our job is to help organizations develop healthy, synergistic teams that produce skyrocketing results.  To do this, we bring tools that show team members what their “team culture” really looks like (from all sides) and how they’re all experiencing it. From there, we assist in making that culture healthier, stronger and more creative so those workers are better able to get the results they want.

To accomplish all this, we utilize a tool called the Leadership Circle Culture Survey. This tool moves beyond individual scapegoating to the team’s culture and dynamic. Rather than have outside consultants evaluate the team, the team evaluates itself. Using this tool, the team defines itself as Creative or Reactive. It identifies what’s getting in the way and also points out the pathway to success. We help everyone see their role in the dysfunctional dynamic—and what they can do to move the team out of it.

This approach is so much more effective because there’s no one from the outside to tell them what’s “right and “wrong” and reinterpret how things work. Everything is self-reported, so team members assess what needs improvement but also get a chance to identify the ways they’re creative and strong together.

Then as a coach and team together, we can look more deeply into those strengths and how to leverage them in a way that “unhooks” the team from reactive tendencies and unwanted culture dynamics.

In essence, a positive work atmosphere leads directly to high productivity. And this tool is designed to quickly fast-forward a team into a culture they can enjoy and in which they can be creative and successful.

This cultural shift is put to work pursuing a vision for the future: What do you all want to create … and how do you work together and collaborate as a team to make that happen? We enjoy bringing great assessment tools to the table that facilitate that shift and help that vision for the future take clear shape.

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.

Sometimes all it takes is having a leadership dinner together or non-working lunches. Often companies place such high value on “producing” that they devalue relationship-building. Remember, just because things in the workplace are cordial doesn’t mean you know one another well, how you each think or what kinds of ideas you best bring to the table. In the vacuum of that actual solid information, people are left making a lot of assumptions about one another—many of which are inaccurate.

It’s important to take the time to hear each other’s stories—to hear where you’ve each had struggles and where you’ve each had triumphs. So we challenge groups to extend the timelines for their retreats and to make the lunch a full hour of sitting and talking and eating together. It’s often an incredible shift to do something so simple, but people are quick to really claim it. Soon they’ll expect to have dinner together in preparation for a big meeting. Soon they’ll expect to have time to just sit and connect with one another without an agenda.

It’s a real cultural shift, especially for extremely busy leaders. But these strong interpersonal relationships are necessary for sustainability because it’s through those conversations and free discussions that trust is instilled. That was certainly true in the case of the “conflict-free” organization described earlier.

We were able to bring them specific tools and insights about relational skills that really resonated such as deep democracy and humor. They were able to embody those values and skills and talk about their intentions. Moving forward, they’re able to use those skills in communicating with each other.

The true poignancy is that in their field, they give voices to those who have been marginalized and create new dialogues … yet those values had not showed up inside the organization itself. We were there to say, “Those values you have, let’s bring them in here.” Connecting the external to the internal worked immediately, but they needed a little outside help to see it that way.