How to Positively Affect Your Workplace Culture as a Leader May 8, 2022 by Belinda EganAfter 2.5 years of this pandemic, your organization’s culture has inevitably shifted dramatically. Along with that, your strategy as a leader and the organization’s strategy has a lot of catching up to do. I asked you what you wanted to hear more about, and the resounding answer is culture + leadership strategy. So, over the next few articles I’ll be diving into exploring these two vast, intersecting topics! Daily working relationships, time management, the setting of personal and professional boundaries, internal and external focus, shareholder influence, and the general trajectory of the organization are all key components of your workplace culture. Most times, when you enter as a new leader, you’ll spend a great deal of your time and energy “reading the room,” as it were – figuring out the culture and how you fit. But as a leader, it’s your responsibility to influence and evolve your workplace culture based on your own cultural ecosystem. After all, what you bring to the table is valuable and important – that’s why you were chosen as a leader! The first step in affecting culture and developing a solid leadership strategy informed by it is to identify what your own cultural ecosystem looks like. Once you’re familiar with your cultural ecosystem, you can develop a strategy to positively influence your organization’s culture. Today’s lesson is about discovering your own cultural ecosystem and merging it with your organization’s workplace culture in a natural, comfortable, and mutually beneficial way. Discovering your own cultural ecosystem and using it for positive change In nature, an ecosystem is a complex environment made up of lifeforms, weather systems, and predictable events that work together to increase reproduction and evolution. In this same way, your own cultural ecosystem is made up of many parts: your characteristics, experiences, beliefs, and values. These aspects of yourself work together to create who you are at work and how you interact with your environment. Assuming you’ve done some inner work to understand yourself better, you’re probably pretty aware of your value and belief systems. You’re also aware of how your experiences have shaped you – at least, the most formative ones. When you take on a role as a new leader, you learn about the priorities, values, and beliefs of the organization you enter, and you make the decision to adjust your ecosystem to fit the culture of the environment you’re in. This is a crucial step in your leadership process – and it’s often where leaders fail to step into their real power. Maybe you’ve been in your current role for a long time, so it’s hard to put your finger on your workplace culture, as you’re in it every day and don’t experience any “culture shock.” Let’s imagine for a moment, then, that you’re cross-promoted to leadership in a different part of your organization. Your role is to clean up a project gone haywire and lead a new team. You feel confident that you’re up to the task. However, throughout the onboarding process, you find out that communication between departments is sorely lacking. On top of that, your team members are sending and receiving emails from other departments marked as “Urgent” late into the night. People are stressed out, overworked, feeling taken advantage of, and suffering from unclear instructions and misunderstandings. Your personal values of clear, concise communication and setting firm boundaries around your time conflict with this culture. You have a choice to make. Do you bend to the culture and do what everyone else is doing, or do you step into your power as a leader, hit pause on the project, and gather the team together to talk about the inner workings of the culture? Depending on how long you’ve been in your role, it might feel impossible, useless, or even fool-hardy to try to affect your workplace culture in a positive way. But if you see it as part of your responsibility as a leader, it becomes imperative instead of optional. And now, after almost three years of a pandemic and the massive waves of change created in the workplace, it’s more important than ever to take the temperature of your workplace culture and ensure it’s working towards the goals of your organization. Identifying culture killers in your organization As mentioned earlier, you might overlook issues with your organization’s workplace culture if you’ve been in your role for a long while. Often, leaders are “sheltered” from the everyday problems that crop up until they’re suddenly forced to put out a fire. Now is the time to go digging. I can assure you that there are culture killers lurking in your midst. And the ones who can show you the problems are the ones being directly affected by them: your team members. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know how often I encourage you to have open and transparent conversations with your team about their work lives. During these conversations, take the time to bring up workplace culture. You can ask your team members to weigh in on specific aspects of workplace culture that you suspect could use some improvement (and ones that they’re familiar with as frontline players), like the general atmosphere of the workplace (“routine” vs. “freedom to explore”) or how team decisions are made (“team-focused” vs. “other-factor-focused”). Be sure to phrase questions unbiased and keep your personal opinion out of it. After all, this isn’t about your experience with the workplace culture but theirs. Once you have a clearer picture of how your team members experience the workplace culture, you can start on a plan to affect it positively and use the opportunity to pump up your leadership strategy. How to shift your workplace culture as a leader If you don’t quite feel you’ve grown your “sea legs” for affecting significant change in your organization, you can start small: have meetings to discuss the current culture with your team, ask them what’s working well and what’s not, and offer ways in which you can help to improve issues. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of giving your team members permission to stick to their boundaries and stand up for themselves. Other times, they need to see a healthy workplace culture modeled to learn how to recognize and encourage it. In the following article, we’ll be getting into proactive and team-focused approaches for developing a solid, courageous leadership strategy based on your observations of your current workplace culture. Keep your finger on the pulse of the latest leadership trends and research by signing up for my newsletter. I share research-based articles, freebies, and weekly Leadership Challenges to expand your vision and reach as a woman in today’s workforce. –Belinda Sign Up Now!