There are ways to change the tide and bring greater optimism and joy into your organization as well as your personal life.
Fostering a happy workplace starts by cultivating optimism within yourself.
Here are four effective strategies for developing positive personal psychology:
When you visualize daily, you align your thoughts and feelings with your vision. This makes it easier to maintain the motivation you need to continue taking the necessary actions.Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning
Developing a vision creates energy and momentum in a company.
But, that energy usually fades over time. The pressure of the now takes over. The vision becomes something that will happen in the distant future.
The vision loses the power it was designed to have: create a passion to motivate you through anything in service of the better future you want.
Perhaps the most popular corporate exercise of the last decade is creating a set of core values, those beliefs that form the foundation of the organization.
Unless this is done by the founder early on in the organizationâs lifeâ when the organization is close to a blank slateâchances are the list created by executives arenât really core values.
These lists usually end up being the way the executives think they want people to behave and not the values that are actually guiding day-to-day behavior.
At their heart, true core values are the beliefs that guide behaviors. The values become internalized to the point of habit. They guide the way people naturally react to situations.
A companyâs purpose flows expressly from its heritage and leads directly to its values.James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine III, Authenticity
A brand is a living entity with three elements: vision, culture, and customer. Leadership creates a vision that inspires employees whose behaviorsâthrough direct interaction and marketingâ translate your brand to your customers. These elements influence each other and collectively create a perception of the company. That perception is the brand.
Underlying all three of these elements is your purpose: what your brand stands for beyond profits. A purpose is why you exist.
People must be motivated by a deeper Cause....I believe that people donât come to work to earn money for themselves and the company. They come to work because the product does something worthwhile, and this is what gets people inspired.Bill George[1. Lance Secretan, Inspire!: What Great Leaders Do, 2004.]
With increasing competitive pressures from existing businesses and industry disruptors, corporations have turned to place greater emphasis on satisfying their employees to maintain or gain a competitive edge.
This has resulted in everything from Google-esque compensation packages to creatingâor more often attempting to createâcultures and business practices based around unique core values, all in an effort to engage and retain employees with more than a paycheck.
Can the sum of a row of many victories over many years be defeat?General Löwenhielm in Gabriel Axelâs Babetteâs Feast
New customers! More revenue! Huge ROI!
Immediate, positive results are attractive and addictive. Itâs easy to understand why: People get praise from their bosses. The current market rewards quarterly capitalism with most investments currently being held somewhere between four and eight monthsâa big change from the average holding of over eight years during the 1960s.[1. Warren Fiske, âMark Warner says average holding time for stocks has fallen to four months,â PolitiFact.com, 2016.] And, many peopleâs jobs depend on these immediate results.
These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven; for nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose,âa point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.Robert Walton in Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein
Talk of pivoting is popular. But, most companies donât have a place to pivot from.[1. Eric J. McNulty, âFind your pillar before you pivot,â strategy+business, 2019.]
When a company only chases profits or market share, they only have the whims of the market to anchor their business. And, when those whims change, their anchors get dislodged and they have to scramble for a new spot to give them stability.
It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you donât know where you are, and if you donât know where you are, then your donât know where youâre going. And if you donât know where youâre going, youâre probably going wrong.Terry Pratchett[1. Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight, 2010.]
As humans, we have the tendency to do what we have always done. What we have always done works, to some degree. But, what we have always done is not the best we are capable of being.
Over time, we develop ways of behaving and reacting. These ways are habitual because they served us at some point, in some situation. And, they are often unconscious: itâs just the way we do things. Yet, often these types of behaviors are not suited for the situations we employ them in.
We get caught up in the constant struggle to keep doing, instead of engaging in the practice of consistently becoming better.
Last week, we wrote an in-depth guide to leading during a crisisâhow they affect an organization and strategies to get through them. The advice also applies to any business situation involving a major change as, at their core, thatâs what crises are: situations of significant change.
One of the keys to navigating a crisisâor a big changeâis what organizational psychologist Edgar Schein calls adaptive moves. In Scheinâs words:
By calling them âadaptive,â I am emphasizing that they are not solutions to âthe problemâ but actions intended to improve the situation and elicit more diagnostic data for the planning of the next move. By calling them âmoves,â I am again emphasizing that they are small efforts to improve the situation, not grand plans or huge intervention.[1. Edgar H, Schein, Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster, 2016.]
When times get difficult, leaders tend to take on burdens greater than they can carry alone. But, this is an impossible situation. In order to achieve anything great in an organization, you need a team to help you get there.
Here are five ways to enable your team to help you achieve your organization's goals.