Aligning team strategy, culture and pulse measures

CulturAlchemy’s Founding Director, Jayne Dunn presented at the Teamgage hosted event Create strategic impact through modern collaboration practices discussing how organisations are using modern team collaboration practices to create strategic impact. 

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Stories

The stories that we tell are a culture carrier. It’s part of how things get shaped. There is an art to telling a really good story and this can be translated to the work environment. What if we flipped the way we tell stories and think about how this can open a new and open dialogue with employees?  
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CulturAlchemy has been creating story circles with executive teams for some time and starts the process with basic questions about what it’s like working for the clients organisation.  

Jayne: “People went deep quickly and by the end of the session there were quite a few tears. As people started sharing, they saw and started to understand the person (their peer) that comes to work every day and the things that keep them awake at night and why they are who they are. You get to understand values and what drives those values.” ‍

For 6 months CulturAlchemy worked on these stories with the executives. What was discovered is that as people told their stories and over 6 months the connections within this executive team really started to shift. The impact was significant and the way they delivered their service was positively different.

Key takeaways from this experience:

Magnets ‍

High influence, high impact employees and leaders act like magnets within your organisation and draw people in. Their conversations bubble ideas. Bring those people together and get them working on something as a team and you will create real energy across the entire organisation.

Values Alignment

The greater the alignment of your values the faster your progress with change.

Energy for change

Know how much energy your people have for change and how to tap into that energy. This will help to increase the pace of change within your organisation while avoiding fatigue.

Culture Dysfunction

Culture change is similar to strategy. Know the degree of dysfunction and what is causing the friction, conflict and frustration.

Knowing what matters

What’s important to measure? Working to understand the language and concepts that tap into the hearts and minds of your people is great for communication and engagement. If you don’t have those deep conversations that need to be had, you won’t get level of engagement that you seek.
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If you enjoyed this, stay tuned to our series of posts about the takeaways from this and future events

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