Category: Culture

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Who do you trust at work? Who trusts you?

Here are some questions to ask.

  • Interests:  does this person share my goals?
  • Competence:  does this person have the required knowledge and ability?
  • Self-confidence: does this person have the self-confidence to let me do my job?
  • Reliability: will this person honour commitments?
  • Honesty:  will this person tell me what I need to know?
  • Attitude: does this person want me to succeed?

Ask yourself how others would answer these questions about you.

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Places of Realised Potential

People with a commitment to potential see potential not merely as self-fulfillment but as expressing stewardship and servanthood. Is where you work a place where potential can be realised? 


A place of realised potential:

  • Opens itself to change, to contrary opinion, to the mystery of potential, to involvement, to unsettling ideas.
  • Offers people the opportunity to learn and grow.
  • Offers the gift of challenging work. 
  •  Sheds its obsolete baggage.
  •  Encourages people to decide what needs to be measured and then helps them to do the work.
  • Heals people with trust and with caring and with forgiveness.
  • Is a social environment – people in places of realised potential know that organisations are social environments.
  •  Celebrates.

Source : Max De Pree (1997)  Leading without power. Finding hope in serving community.  Jossey-Bass  ISBN-13: 978-0787910631

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Is your self-talk holding you back? Reset your mindset

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Carol Dweck

Do you have a “Fixed” or “Growth” mindset?

  • Iacocca  
    • Surround yourself with worshipers, exile the critics, loose touch with reality.  My way or the highway!
  • Welch  
    • Regularly tore up the agenda in the face of new circumstances. Flexible and adaptive.
  • Dunlap
    • Short-term gain leads to long term collapse.  Simple fixes.  Trash the people. One size fits all.
  • Gertsner
    • Overhauled the culture: called a failure: short-term pain to put company back in the lead. Do it different.

See Carol S Dweck (2006) Mindset: the new Psychology of Success

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Create the right climate at work and results will follow

Climate is the key determinant of performance.  Every action and decision you take will have a direct impact on the climate in the organisation.

I am sure many readers will have shared the experience of attending a culture change workshop where a “desired culture” is identified and a list of “behaviours” is identified. Then we all go back to work where we continue to do the same things we always do in the hope that the culture will change.  Unless new and different activities are introduced the change efforts will be suboptimal.

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