RESOURCES
Build the emotional culture for strategic success – Basic action plan
Every organisation has an emotional culture which can significantly impact strategic outcomes and financial performance. When used correctly, emotional data offers valuable insights that help leaders make clear, intentional decisions in support of organisational strategic goals.
Step 1: Determine the current state of your organisation’s emotional culture.
Do you know how your employees feel? Are they engaged, or do they feel safe to offer their ideas and feedback? Or, do they feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and resentful?
Ways to find that out:
- Ask your team directly through surveys, workshops, or quick check-ins in meetings.
- Use the information already collected and available, e.g., staff turnover and absence stats, the number of ideas submitted, or the number of mistakes reported, every quarter. Every number tells a story about your emotional culture.
Step 2: Define the desired emotional culture.
As a leadership team, collectively identify the emotions you want people to feel for your strategy to succeed.
Consider the following questions:
- Is the existing emotional culture sufficient, or do we need to change it?
- What do we need people to do more of or less of for the organisation to be successful? E.g., if people currently don’t feel safe, they are unlikely to be willing to share new ideas or help us develop new products or services. What steps would we have to take to change that?
- How can the leadership team influence the emotional culture in the right direction?
Step 3: Close the gap between the current and desired emotional culture.
Agree with your leadership team on a list of the behaviours and actions necessary to achieve the desired emotional culture.
Bring the list to life in daily interactions by:
- Consistently role-modeling these behaviours in micro-moments.
- Formally integrating them into all stages of human resource management, from recruitment to onboarding and annual performance reviews.
- Celebrating the efforts that demonstrate the desired behaviours.
- Creating team rituals that further strengthen and sustain the new emotional culture.
