Whole Care Network → 03 Podcast: Dilemmas In The Workplace

are you suffering from staff turnover too many lost business opportunities is your reputation at risk if so you know your workplace culture needs Improvement but determining how to do so and where to start is about as fun and effective as trying to assemble a puzzle with no picture to guide you culture change in a box is a show that takes you on a compelling Deep dive into an effective real-time culture change process so you can begin to feel hopeful and re-energized about your business and now here are your hosts for culture change in a box Chris mclen and Judy Ryan well greetings everyone it’s Chris mlen the vot tag ey for another episode of culture change in a box and I’m here with my good friend Judy Ryan from Life work systems sayy Judy hi I’m so glad to be back isn’t this fun this is so much fun and we just you know we’re we’re in a nice little location here in St Louis beautiful even on a kind of gray day it’s still beautiful this morning we’re in but you know we’re we’re interested in coming to you if you’re especially if you’re in the Metro St Louis area we’re happy to uh bring culture change in a box have culture change we’ll travel we have culture change we’ll travel and you know and if you’re not in St Louis we’re still interested in in coming to you as well cuz we’re well we’re our processes are all virtual and scalable so we really don’t see any limitations on no limitations yeah yeah well today our topic is dilemas yes dilemmas in workplace culture yes um really dilemmas are what bring about change in anybody right and so what happens is um companies are really struggling a lot of times with specific issues like retaining good people attracting good people um one of the areas we work in we work in a lot of healthcare it’s not the only Market we work in but healthcare for example is is growing so rapidly that they can’t keep the supply and demand up and and because of the Baby Boomers and they’re all aging sure and so in that market for example if you don’t have a healthy workplace culture and you can’t attract and retain those people they can just job hop to another job because there’s plenty of jobs and not enough people right exactly so it’s more important than ever to help people with that and to help make sure that the team is getting along that they’re really liking each other that there’s High trust and that the morale stays high and that you are able to identify and redirect negative behavior when it shows up so we we do something with customers when we first get involved with them that is actually super helpful to both sides of the of the equation when an organization typically they’ll see us through reading a book that I wrote or through a presentation or a podcast like this right and they’ll start to have this idea that there’s a real solution for them and they want to explore further so we do what’s called an exploration survey okay and it’s it’s a free survey we do but what it does is it begins to educate the business owner or leader in what a healthy workplace culture has in place place so it asks a lot of questions around requirements Gathering and Analysis you know analysis of their human systems and are do we have a plan in place for our human systems and our in our culture and are we testing that and are we maintaining that and are we implementing everything we should be implementing so as it’s asking them specific questions about those five things they’re checking boxes off saying oh this question is asking me do I have a workplace culture plan I didn’t know I was supposed to have a workplace culture plan right what’s that is so it begins to help them understand what they should even have that they don’t know that they don’t know right and then at the end we have a whole list of 27 possible challenges some people just check off one or two but some people check off all 27 oh goodness and it’s a it’s a wakeup call for them and it’s also a tool to help us better understand what they have in place how sophisticated they are around culture or not and what challenges they’re specifically up against and in what kind of priority order and it gives us a a basis for real conversation when we first sit down with them because we’ve already got some mutual understanding of each other in addition to having them check mark all of these different challenges we also have them uh check mark a lot of questions around what kind of leadership skills do you want in your workplace that you don’t have enough of oh goodness and those are like maybe about another 20 more and they’re able to kind of go through oh yeah I want people to be able to master emotional and social intelligence or I want them to have skills for really you know training their staff or you know coaching their staff or whatever and as they see these improvements that they want they’re also checking those kind of like this is an improvement I want so the bottom line that we have people look at to kind of identify their dilemmas is if they’re saying things like we don’t get along as well as we could or we’re not being as responsible or self-motivated as we should be or we’re not helping each other overcome challenges and Achieve goals cuz really and truly every company has goals they want to accomplish exactly and they have challenges they’re trying to overcome and if you don’t have everybody kind of helping on that you really are kind of um uh hand tied around it so if they’re saying things like we’re not organized we’re not reliable we don’t have enough stability going on um we’re not designing Innovations like we should be we’re not staying ahead of the the trends um our reputation isn’t as strong as it could be uh we’re not making the revenues capable of or our success is sort of up and down like any of those kinds of dilemas should be an indication to an organization that they need to really take a look at their culture because those are symptoms you know there there’s an organ there’s org an Nationwide all actually international organization that comes to mind that that kind of missed the mark when technology came up Kodak you know Kodak uh they were you know everybody had a digital camera when it came to Kodak but they their culture stayed in that one box right it’s easy to do what we’ve always done it’s harder to move forward it’s harder to move move forward and I think that that’s really what the essence the message that we’re trying to convey here you know it’s it sometimes we have to look right and and sometimes maybe a lot of things are going well around relationships but maybe they’re not going as well around uh the next Trend we need to be on top of or the next our our our our business process is captured effectively things like that so there’s a lot of dilemas that a company’s facing but really the the way to make that whole process easier is to come at it from a systems approach in all areas of the business and in particular wouldn’t it be great if you had a handle on all your human systems so they become no-brainers it’s so so important right right so what what we do is we are helping people to consciously develop specific leadership skills and we are helping them to examine the conventional solutions that have always been in place and to debunk that they’re so great right because a lot of them are coming out of s archaic archaic models models that came from uh desperation survival from the depression a lot of the systems in schools for example which translate into the way we raise kids and then raise adults and how they behave in other structures were based on systems designed to create complying conformant conforming Factory workers mhm we don’t that’s not what we need now well it’s not to say we don’t need Factor workers but we need people that can collaborate and be creative and innovate together and those are not just drones that are Mindless right those are people that are really um selfers their um inductive reasoning skills are strong when we when we did this in our family and we had our kids on stage telling people what they had created and hadn’t created they would say things like yeah we tried this to to do chores and it didn’t work out at all then we made this job wheel and then you know that worked for about 3 months and then you know so they were able to do trial and error which you need in a company you need to be able to have everybody kind of barn raising together and so we part of the process in that is really questioning the conventional model so that you stop clinging to them cuz there is a part of us that believes that the old ways work just fine just fine yeah and and and the sad part about it is quote unquote they do work sometimes like if I had a gun and I shot it into the ceiling and you believe me when I said if you cross your legs I’m going to shoot you you you wouldn’t cross your legs would you wouldn’t cross your legs right likewise if I had a $1 thousand bill here and I said Chris if you don’t cross your legs I’ll give you this thousand bill you’d probably keep your leg un cross right legs Andross so so punishment rewarding and and external controls work quote unquote right but there’s huge price tags to them very much so and it’s been proven that both punishment and reward CA a a lowering of internal commitment to the behavior so that’s why it’s very important to let go of the old but you can’t like go the old one it seems so powerful and it feels so like I know how to do this right well because it’s a it’s a system that you’re used to and change change is very difficult even if it’s the change is good you know you at least know what the expectations are yes and and I don’t think people actually believe initially that the old ways aren’t good enough they don’t believe that yet there’s a part of them saying well I’ll kind of consider dip my toe in over here but really this one is a tried and true right we need to smash that illusion that tried and true has really been so true right it might been try but it’s not so true without serious consequences to it and so there’s um there’s really educating people on the understanding of those consequences of doing it the way that it’s always been done in the places that it has not been working and so there are new innovations that are now available and people just need to become aware of those and really believe in them and have faith in those so that they can jump from the old to the new you know we we’ve talked about this on some of our previous shows but again it it it really comes back to the to the leadership taking ownership yes and the ownership that we want for them is responsibility we want them to own we are doing a responsibility based value based model that’s the biggest owning of anything um once they decide that that’s the model for them then that becomes the the ultimate responsibility that they face it’s kind of like I’m a parent so I speak from parenting as well but um I could have found a million different kinds of models to parent my kids I could have taken the old uh spare the rod spoil the child approach right and it would have created a whole set of consequences differently than I have today but because I chose a responsibility based value based model for my family half the time the kids in the neighborhood were coming to my house saying we need us we need to do a dialogue tool or we need to do a thermometer exercise you my kids would be like come to my house we know how to help you with that right I mean it was really cool and even today they teach their own children and the people they work with CU all this stuff is transferable what you learn in their it works at home it works in schools people are always saying that when we teach in one they’re like it’s working over here so we have raised five kids who are very much their own person who know how to problem solve who are help their children know how to problem solve because they learned responsibility based modeling and so that’s really what the leaders are learning about and fully embracing if they’re going to be successful in our in our processes does that make sense very much so taking ownership goodness yeah taking ownership yeah it it actually is the path to freedom and joy but we’re not quite convinced of that most of the time until we really embrace it and do it and then we feel like we are living a life that that we have chosen and that we are actively participating in um just to kind of do a sidebar do we have time for oh very much so okay so I work with organizations on defining purpose and always usually the leader is very willing because the leader has already kind of decided I’m I’m in right they’re already committing money and time and all of that but we get to about month four in our training processes and we have a topic where everybody in the company is now learning how to write their own purpose and values it’s so important I can’t tell you how rebellious people get at that stage not kiding they they want to they want to flake out about it they want to talk about how it has nothing to do with work um I had a a a person recently who heard one of our Concepts is that everyone in a workplace needs to feel empowered lovable connected and contributing and she replied on her survey uh that’s insulting that we have to worry about people being lovable right being lovable and I said I can understand how you feel that way yeah but the fact of it is if you have two scenarios and one is one in which people are uh warmly welcoming you into the room and inviting your input and showing curiosity and interest in you versus another group who may just not give you any of those cues they could be the same people they could actually both be a group of people that want to hear from you and want you on the team but in one scenario you’re going to probably deduce that you don’t fit in that you’re not wanted that you’re not important to them and that would be a harmful mistake so you can see how helping people to feel visible and lovable is important to their functioning to their feeling their sense of I’m I wanted in this situation and so being able to lead in a way that really is constantly focused on how do I help people to be responsible to creating collectively what we want to be occurring and it’s got a lot of moving parts to it very much so goodness so I want to jump to an area uh it’s an acronym that you use and I actually wrote a little bit about it in my thesis the row okay love it I I love I love it all and I’m I’m racking my brain with the acronym well I’ll give you another one to even make you feel worse but they’re kind of connected okay there’s also a term called a chord and a chord is a combination of the word Chaos and Order oh goodness isn’t that a fun little we’re going to do a show on that word okay um a Kord and row are very similar because what you’re saying is you’re saying everybody can have their own um personhood and their own set of skills and talents and that if you intend an outcome so that’s where the order comes in then everybody comes to the table saying oh I see how I would approach that outcome and let me contribute this part to it so you’re having faith that if you have a focus that the chaos in the room will move in the direction of solving and creating that outcome otherwise chaos is just chaos for chaos sake right but anything that is chaos is actually a very free flowing state of being the problem is most people either want to just do it ad hoc their life and everything else and then it just kind of like almost happen Dan where it goes and it can easily get off track right so a Kart is somebody that says I know we have all this beautiful wonderful little chaos going on over here like nature does but we know how to direct it toward Beauty and toward goodness and so on row is like that as well row is where you say we have a certain result and we’re going to make the result everything so in our um example that I gave last week was about taking productivity and having whole teams work on how are we going to accomplish that right that’s a row because you’re saying our result is the only thing that matters and we can do whatever we want to get there within you know the within values and purpose but it opens this incredible way where you find all these third and fourth and fifth and sixth options that you couldn’t see on your own it reminds me of when we raised um uh our whole family together to build my brother’s house was kind of a barn raising kind of a thing and everybody brought I remember I learned how to hang hang uh insulation and all this stuff you know and we all brought music to it I mean it was it was chaotic but it was organized because we had a result in mind and it was incredibly fulfilling and everybody felt they were part of so that’s what a row is really you know designed to do it result orientated result oriented work environment so instead of saying we’re all just G to uh like here’s a great example of this if you were to train two people to work on an airplane one you might say here’s the steps you do you read the instructions you go and make sure that everything’s locked and all those things that the stor dist and stores do right but a results oriented workplace would say that our result is we want everybody to leave the plane smiling we want them to feel safe and secure we want them to be com able so now I’m focused on those results and yes we’re going to still do those other things but I’m also going to be paying attention to the things that aren’t necessarily in the original list because if I see somebody shivering I might say hey would you like a blanket or you look a little nervous could I get you a magazine right um because we’re focusing on purpose and results in an end game and that’s really what the the row is all about and when we can train people and have faith in their ability to jump in and know what to do we’ve turned them from being sort of mindless into being really creative fun um fulfilled contributors having faith in the system letting go of old habits having faith in the people as well and their goodness and their goodness and trusting and and building trust with each other and holding people to trust yeah it’s a beautiful combination and it helps alleviate dilemas it it absolutely does in fact we say if you do this well you don’t even have to hardly use our redirecting negative behavior tool because the about 90% of the behavior clears up on its own goodness we’re just having so much fun doing this we moving and shaking aren’t we we moving to shaking and you know with that we invite all of our listeners and people that we’re involved with to join us in creating a world in which people love their lives and I I think we’re I think we’re helping people yes well we do invite you because the world does need you you matter you matter to the Sol solutions that the world needs so desperately right now I’m so glad you’re listening all we need is love we do and it is true love is the answer but most of us don’t know how to do it so well and when we don’t and we get frustrated we default to some pretty nasty things so let’s just get good at it that’s Judy Ryan I’m Chris mclen culture chain is a box is a part of the wholecare network check us out online at Hare network.com and be sure to visit Judy at lifework systems.com and I creating a life to Love by being with awesome people like Judy Ryan and Chris mlod we’ll see you soon for another episode of culture change in a box bye-bye bye thank you