by Alicia Haun | Mar 24, 2023 | Consulting, Culture Change, Leadership, Leadership Development, Organizational Culture, Positive Practices
The Struggle with Toxic Workplaces
Christine Porath grew up watching her dad struggle with toxic bosses. She saw the toll these taxing relationships took on his health and how it colored his life when he came home as well. Now a professor of management at Georgetown, Porath has devoted her career to discovering ways we can make work better, which only makes sense “given how much time and energy people spend in the workplace.” She recently spoke about her work and latest book, Mastering Community, in a conversation with Gretchen Spreitzer in the Positive Links series at the Center for Positive Organizations.
The average person spends 90,000 hours of their life working. But somehow, these hours are often devoid of a strong sense of community. In a study she conducted with Tony Schwartz, the CEO of The Energy Project, Porath found that over 65% of people felt no sense of community at work — and this is pre-pandemic, with the lack of community only getting worse. Even with people being back in the office and physically working next to each other, that doesn’t necessarily translate to feeling connected to each other. Instead, workers are faced with dealing with issues like isolation and loneliness alone.
What is Community?
Being part of a community takes more than just sitting side by side or working for the same company. So what do you need in order to form a community? Porath proposes that a community is “a group of individuals who share a concern for each other’s welfare,” which can happen with families, local communities, faith groups, and organizations. Being in a community requires caring for the other people and trusting that they care for you as well.
Work being a place of community isn’t just a nice-to-have, though. We languish when we face isolation and loneliness, and our confidence drops. But when we’re part of a community, that pushes us more towards the thriving end of the spectrum, where we are constantly moving forwards, growing, and learning. And opposite to what Porath witnessed with her dad, thriving in and out of work creates an ampliative cycle because thriving in the workplace is positively correlated with thriving outside of the workplace. Instead of toxic workplaces draining you, a thriving workplace can buoy your energy and sense of purpose, building your internal resources to be able to pursue what fills you up outside of work as well. And if you’re thriving outside of work too, then you bring to the office “a stronger, more resilient self that tends to perform better, that’s healthier, more focused, more likely to stay.”
5 Positive Practices to Build Community
So how can we go about building community in our workplaces? Virtual or in-person, the biggest goal is to create shared experiences. Porath and Spreitzer offered some ideas on how we can do that:
- Hobby Workshops — People often find purpose and meaning through teaching. Teams can tap into that by creating a space for people to take turns teaching each other about the things they’re passionate about, whether that be knitting or butchering or gardening.
- Group Fitness Challenges — Fitness challenges foster both community and accountability. Plus, working on your physical wellbeing together can have lots of positive spillover into other areas of wellbeing.
- Book Clubs — A hallmark of community activities, book clubs offer the opportunity to learn together. You could also expand your idea of a book club and branch out into movies or podcasts!
- Walking Meetings — Everyone has meetings, so why not make some of them walking meetings? Spreitzer loves this practice because of simple it is to make a small change to something she already does every day. She finds walking meetings especially powerful when she has to have difficult conversations because it cultivates a feeling of moving forward together.
- Love and Loathe — A quick weekly pulse, Love and Loathe helps managers get feedback often so they can support their people in a meaningful way. Porath gave the example of when an executive reported having a heavy week, and the CEO scheduled a one-on-one first thing Monday morning in order to support her. That executive then shared her experience and modeled the same level of care with those that she supported.
Spirit of Experimentation
When it comes to how leaders approach building community, Spreitzer suggested thinking of it as an opportunity to infuse workplaces with lightness and fun, different from the demands of the job. She shared that sometimes, as a leader, she feels she has to figure it all out by herself, but when it comes to fostering connections, sometimes leaders aren’t the best at figuring out what would be fun for their people or what would be a shared experience to elevate the group. Instead, leaders should shift from wondering how to get their people to connect to asking themselves what they can do to help their people pursue their values together and unleash community building.
One of the best ways to engage people is to embrace a spirit of experimentation and play — try things out and create small wins. You don’t have to have a lot of power or status to do this transformative work. Starting a book club, for example, wouldn’t require any formal authority in an organization. Importantly, though, these experiments in community should be voluntary to avoid the activities feeling like simply another task to add to your workload. But if you can get some people on board, trying these positive practices at small or large scales, you’ll see a great return on investment in terms of how people are thriving in and out of work. When people are thriving, they bring more positive energy to the organization, which reinforces the positive practices and builds a bigger and stronger sense of community.
In our work here at Riverbank, we strive to support organizations in creating more positive cultures. We bring our research-backed knowledge of positive practices to guide leaders as they experiment to see what works best for their teams. By resourcing the organizations we work with, we’re helping work become more enjoyable, fulfilling, and productive.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Feb 8, 2023 | Communication, Consulting, Culture Change, Feedback, Leadership, Leadership Development, Organizational Culture, Positive Leadership, Positive Practices, Uncategorized, Values-Driven Leadership
I’m a devotee of Positive Organizational Scholarship and all the data-driven positive practices that arise from it. Beyond my work in this field, many of my classes for my Decision and Cognition major deal with making sense of behavior and decision-making, especially when it comes to strategies for behavior change. So with all this background under my belt, why have I felt so anxious lately at the prospect of introducing some positive practices to my team in my marketing class?
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Riverbank Consultant Joyce Washington. With her extensive experience in managing major organizational responses to provide aid for insurance customers and dedication to furthering racial and social justice, Joyce gave a lot of encouragement and wise insights on how to approach introducing positive change.
I confided in Joyce about how nervous I was to ask my team to try out Keeps and Adjusts to reflect after our first couple meetings and assignments. When we first formed our team, I told them about my work with the Center for Positive Organizations and how I had lots of potential positive practices we could infuse into our work, and everyone seemed very open and receptive. But when it came time to try one out, I worried about someone shooting down the idea or it seeming like I was assigning an extra task or it backfiring if we didn’t handle critiques well.
Joyce listened empathetically and shared her mindset on approaching change:
“I think it’s clear that in any group, there’s going to be people who are open and receptive to change and new ideas, and there’s a certain percentage of people who are open and not quite sure, and there’s a certain percentage of people who can’t hear at all, for whatever their reasons. My approach has always been to remain authentic and inclusive.”
Joyce emphasized that at the end of the day, everyone in a team or in an organization is working toward the same goal together. There’s common ground in what you’re all striving towards. By incorporating positive practices, we can try to make the journey more enjoyable. Oftentimes that will get us to the destination more efficiently at the same time, which is a worthwhile goal for any leader:
“I think it’s important to understand that and to be okay that everybody won’t be able to see the world from your positive interaction. But as a leader, you have to continue to be inclusive of them and respect whatever their opinions might be. As the leader, you are responsible for getting the team to the goal.”
Joyce granted that over the course of your career, sometimes you’ll run into people who don’t share your desire for positivity and may be negative for negativity’s sake, “but you can’t let that one or two people take you off track.” But of course, we have to be clear what we mean when we say negative:
“Now, having differences of opinion isn’t necessarily a negative. You don’t want a bunch of yes-people because a bunch of yes-people will get you nothing. There’s no growth in that. There’s not a good return on your investment with a bunch of yes-people in the long term.”
My team agreed to do Keeps and Adjusts, and we spoke openly and kindly about what we thought we were doing well and about our concerns for the project. As any new practice, it felt a bit strange, but that’s how it feels when you’re growing together and fostering open communication.
I mentioned to Joyce how I was thinking of introducing another positive practice, this time in my team’s meetings with our client, but the nerves were springing up again. She suggested how I might present the idea of check-ins to our client, being clear and concise about what check-ins look like and the benefits from doing them. But what I found most helpful was Joyce’s encouragement and how she told me that, so long as they don’t become overwhelming, nerves are a good thing in this area:
“Know that feeling anxious or nervous is a good thing because it helps you avoid being overconfident and arrogant. That’s a good thing. It’s a way of staying humble, and that’s a good thing in a leader. It’s okay to feel anxious and nervous.”
My team’s next client meeting started with a round of check-ins, and later on, our client mentioned how she felt that we really understood her and how much she trusted us with her brand. Trying something new, even when it’s data-driven and pretty much a win-win like so many positive practices, can be intimidating. But that’s okay. Being nervous means that you care and that you’re engaged. And when your goal is to make life a little bit better for yourself and those around you, taking that leap is sure to be worthwhile.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Jan 20, 2023 | Culture Change, Leadership, Organizational Culture
I worry that I’m not a quick judge of how well I’ll mesh with someone. This week, my marketing class chose our project teams for the entire semester. After everyone gave a 45 second pitch of what they have to offer, we had 5 minutes of frenzy to form our alliances. I had some challenging interpersonal dynamics in my project team last semester, so I spent the days leading up to class imagining what a positive team culture could look like and how I could present myself in order to convey my values.
I’m very hopeful about my team, and I’m trying to set the tone for our interactions, suggesting some positive practices like starting meetings off with 30 second celebrations and inviting them over for a game night to get to know them a bit better. As is probably clear through my commitment to Positive Organizational Scholarship, I deeply value organizational and team culture. With a team of strangers forming all at once, it’s a challenge to guess what the dynamics might be like later on (but, on the flip side, you have more flexibility to craft the culture).
I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the cultures I want to be a part of lately. The recruiting process continues, and, after a lot of reflection, I’ve realized that my biggest priority, outside of lifestyle goals (yay puppy!), is to work for an organization known for its positive culture because I want that firsthand experience before trying to implement change. When you’re looking to join an established organization, as opposed to starting from scratch, it’s a bit easier to assess the culture already at play.
But how do we go about figuring out what the culture of an organization or a team is like? Karen Eber, in a recent webinar with Degreed and TED@Work, emphasizes that first we have to “understand that culture is not an initiative, it’s not something done by the CEO and that’s it — that it is a living aspect of your organization that has to be shaped each day.” In order to catch a glimpse of the lived experience in an organization, Eber warns against asking interviewers the direct question, “What is the culture like here?” This question is too general and prompts answers that just parrot the phrasing on the website.
Instead, Eber encourages asking specific questions to elicit stories that are representative of the broader lived experience. You might want to know how they typically begin their meetings or solicit feedback. Eber says that with these questions, “it’s not that there’s a right or wrong answer,” you’re “getting to specific moments that help uncover that leader’s style and what they value” to see if it aligns with your own.
In today’s job market, culture is important for organizations because it’s important to the people they’re looking to hire: “You can have the best business strategy in the world, but if you aren’t attracting the talent that can deliver that or creating a day-to-day environment that is going to enable them, you’re not going to meet it.” My own decision to base my first job on organizational culture makes this clear, but we want to be careful not to think that culture is static — that you can ever adequately and accurately assess the culture of an organization before joining it and trust it to stay that way in perpetuity. Just as culture is about lived experience, culture is a living, dynamic thing in and of itself.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen how radically and suddenly things can change at massive scales. These changes have had obvious and profound effects on how we conceive of organizations and their cultures, but change also happens on an individual scale, all the time. With all of these changes happening, there’s some malleability to our organizational cultures — and there should be. As Eber says, “If companies aren’t staying in tune with those things, then they’re suddenly trying to cram you into something that doesn’t fit. And when you’re in an environment where you feel that you don’t fit, you leave, and you opt out.”
But people don’t always leave. Chris White, our principal here at Riverbank, warns that when individuals don’t identify with the organizational culture, they can contribute to an attitude of change-resistance. White puts forth three actions such individuals might take: check out, act out, walk out. In the first two cases, an employee might choose to stay with an organization, but they are simply disengaged or actively working against the organization’s goals. And these aren’t trivial issues. Gallup reports that “Employees who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity,” going on to say that “In 2021, 21% of the world’s employees were engaged at work.”
Fostering a positive culture becomes an even clearer need with these statistics in mind. After recounting the evolution of workplaces from the assembly line to office workers to knowledge workers to the dot com era and beyond, Eber reminds us that the relationship between an organization and an employee should be mutually beneficial, especially in the job market today:
“It is no longer the case that you are lucky as an employee to have a job. It’s a two-way street. The company benefits from your knowledge and skills. You are an addition. You are helping them, and it is a blessing to them, and it is a blessing to you. There is this unspoken agreement that is renewed in meetings and conversations because all it takes is for one moment, where someone feels really frustrated and that they don’t fit in to say, ‘I’m done. Because I know how the other options available look to me.’“
We can and should continue to think purposefully about organizational culture, thinking about the ways we can help it to shift gracefully to support the employees in an organization as they change and grow. Culture is in the hands of everyone in an organization, as Eber maintains:
“We all shape culture. I can’t emphasize this enough. Whenever someone says, ‘Oh, can you come fix our culture?’ No, I can’t I can help you see how to evolve your culture. I can help you see how to shape your culture — because, by the way, you’re never done, no culture is ever finished — it is shaped every day by every person.”
Whether you’re forming a team with people you don’t know yet or looking to join a new organization or thinking about how your organization could grow with your people, we can be thoughtful and purposeful in the ways we contribute to and shape the culture we are a part of, with the goal of promoting engagement and enjoyment at work.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Jan 10, 2023 | Culture Change, Feedback, Organizational Culture, Positive Practices, Values-Driven Leadership
I always thought fall was my favorite season, but I think I’m falling in love more with winter the last few years. Starting with November and Thanksgiving (technically fall, I know, but Michigan weather makes you forget that) to January and New Year’s, we get to enjoy so many celebrations (especially in my family where all of our birthdays fall in that time too!). Many of us enjoy the holidays — the way we connect with others, take the time to celebrate, engage in reflection — and the time off work doesn’t hurt either. But wouldn’t it be great if we could take the spirit of the holidays with us into our everyday lives as work starts up again in the new year? Positive Organizational Scholarship is the key.
The holidays offer an opportunity to share the reasons that you’re grateful for the people around you. What strengths do you notice in them? How do they show up for themselves and others? While Thanksgiving might be a prime time to offer these moments of gratitude, we can also look to the Reflected Best Self Exercise, a tool developed by the Center for Positive Organizations. With this, you can reflect on stories of the times that you recognize yourself at your best and gather the perspectives of those that know you best so you can better understand how to be your best self more often.
In addition to Chopped, my family has another tradition of Hallmark Movie Bingo, where we fill our boards with all of the tropes the cheesiest movies have to offer (my favorite is the awkwardly thorough 20 second backstory). When we’re done with movies, we’ll gather around to try out the NYT crossword (with all three of us together, we can tackle a Thursday puzzle). Playing together, we feel more energized, more creative, and more connected. We can foster these feelings too in organizations by creating a culture of play. We can infuse play into work in all sorts of ways, like turning to imaginative games for brainstorming, welcoming jokes in the office, or even trying out some silly email sign-offs.
I started my Christmas shopping back in July, so you know I am very into gift-giving. But as we all know, engaging in the spirit of giving doesn’t just mean physical gifts. We can give the gift of our time, emotional support, skills, knowledge, you name it. Organizations are full of untapped resources, and in his research on generosity, Wayne Baker has found that people are more than willing to help — they just don’t always know how or what others need. Baker’s biggest recommendation is to learn how to ask for what you need — so maybe we should think back to the times we made Christmas lists for Santa.
With the new year, it’s time to reflect on the last year and start thinking about the next one. Life is a series of transitions, and each can bring up all sorts of emotions. As I think about the new year, I’m thinking about starting my last semester of college, and graduating will be one of the biggest transitions of my life. But taking the time to take stock of the past year, all the ways I’ve grown and the lessons I’ve learned, helps to shore up my internal resources to take on the next phase. We should take the time to reflect and appreciate whatever emotions come up in the transitions we go through, whether it be year to year, job to job, or project to project.
What resolutions are you setting for the new year? What habits do you want to set for yourself? For your team, for your organization? Habits are integral to forming sustainable change, and we can be purposeful about what habits we want to form our day to day experiences, which in turn can shape organizational culture. What positive practices could you turn into a habit? You might consider keeping a gratitude journal, starting meetings with check-ins, or ending meetings with Keeps and Adjusts.
I’m back at school and missing the holiday season, but I know we can keep the holiday spirit alive throughout the year if we embrace some of the positive practices set forth in positive organizational scholarship.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. She is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Dec 16, 2022 | Culture Change, Diversity, Organizational Culture, Uncategorized
Bringing Your Whole Self to Work
As I’ve been looking at companies I might want to work for after college, there are a few phrases that I like to see in terms of company culture. One of the main ones for me is the claim that you can “bring your whole self” to work. In my experience of positive organizations, I like when people can show up as they are in each moment, sharing the good and the bad in their lives, if they so choose.
I wonder if it’s so simple, though. Who is my whole self? This likely isn’t a huge revelation, but I don’t present myself exactly the same when I’m interacting with my friends, my family, my supervisors — I doubt anyone does. I don’t think I’d want to interact with all of these people in the same way. BetterUp suggests that we might then think of bringing our whole selves to work in this way:
“What it does mean is that the ‘you at work’ should also be recognizable to and coherent with the ‘you at home.’ There shouldn’t be a personality change — if you’re enthusiastic and outgoing at home, that’s how your coworkers should know you, too. It enables us to show ourselves, our coworkers, and managers who we are, not just what we do.”
The Authenticity Paradox
When we continue to explore these ideas, we arrive at another organizational culture buzzword: authenticity. While sometimes we hear it as an organizational pillar, oftentimes we think of authenticity in terms of leadership — what does it mean to be an authentic leader?
Organizational behaviorist Herminia Ibarra tackles the complexities of this question in her work on what she terms the Authenticity Paradox. Ibarra particularly studies leaders facing “the moments when you realize that whatever made you successful in the past or got you there will not make you successful going forward and might even get in your way.” This sort of predicament is especially common when people transition into leadership positions because of their demonstrated technical skill.
Society lauds the authentic leader, but Ibarra finds that sometimes the desires for authenticity can limit growth in these new leadership roles:
“What’s tricky about these transition points is not that the new skills are hard to learn, it’s that the old ones have become core to our sense of who we are, our identity. As a result, not sticking with them feels like we’re somehow being inauthentic and so we do — and we get stuck.”
Instead, Ibarra advocates for leaders to focus on their growth by experimenting with their leadership experiences, working on different projects with different people in different ways. Leaders can then reflect on what strategies they might like to adopt and how. Ibarra suggests that leaders can thus benefit from a flexible understanding of themselves as learning and growing:
“An important part of growing as a leader is viewing authenticity not as an intrinsic state but as the ability to take elements you have learned from others’ styles and behaviors and make them your own.”
How We Portray Ourselves
If authenticity isn’t grounded in habits or actions, how might we understand it? As I explore this question for myself, I find myself guided by my values. I started puzzling about this idea of authenticity after attending Laura Huang’s talk on her research in self-presentation. I wondered if this strategic way of approaching interactions with others invoked a layer of artifice, but I come back to the realization that we, as complex human beings, don’t have — and shouldn’t have — one sense of self that we present in the same way in every situation. But we can anchor our self-presentation in our values. As BetterUp suggests,
“Success requires interacting with other people. We can’t control the other side of those interactions. But we can think about how the other person might see us and make choices about what we want to convey.”
We can think about resumes as a classic example of figuring out how we want to portray ourselves professionally. I used to hate the idea of a resume. I felt that with such a defined form, it was impossible to convey any sense of who I really am on that single page. Yes, there are certain rules you have to follow with a resume, in almost all cases — first off, you have to have one, and it should be one page, and it should be formatted in a certain way, at least if you’re applying to companies that put your resume through a screening software.
But in the last few years, I’ve come to make some choices about how I present myself on my resume that are aligned with my values. I list my VIA character strengths because I believe in strengths-based leadership and positive organizational tools. I include some of my hobbies in order to give a fuller sense of who I am because I think organizations should hire whole people and not just a set of skills. I don’t include my address because it’s no longer necessary and might open applicants up for discrimination about where they live. I’ve made all of these little tweaks to make my resume feel authentic to my values, while still presenting myself following professional guidelines.
I don’t know if it’s possible to bring my whole self to work because I’m not sure who my whole self is or if such a thing even exists. But as long as I allow myself to learn and grow while being true to my values, I’m being my authentic self. No matter what stage of work we’re at, whether we’re submitting resumes, going on interviews, doing our daily tasks, or moving up in our organizations, there are strategies we can use to show up authentically in terms of our values. Someone who values giving back to the community might list their volunteering and community organizing efforts on their resume, ask about an organization’s philanthropic activities in an interview, participate in a shadowing program showing a student the ropes of their role, and institute a company-wide food drive. Someone else who particularly values educational opportunities might provide a list on their resume of the ad hoc courses they’ve pursued, seek companies that provide tuition assistance, create stretch goals for themselves, and introduce a new organizational habit of starting meetings off with a share-out of one new thing each person has learned. Whatever our values might be, we can infuse them into every aspect of our work, enriching our own experiences and that of those around us.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Nov 30, 2022 | Communication, Consulting, Culture Change, Diversity, Leadership, Leadership Development
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it, but I’ve started the recruiting process for my first Real Job after I graduate. My first interview felt momentous, an entirely new experience. I currently have four jobs, so I’m no stranger to the hiring process, but most of the roles I’ve held so far have come from opportunities to work with people I already know — and, more importantly, who already know me.
I worked through my interview prep, anchored by an acronym to help structure interview responses: STAR. First, you want to establish the Situation (using only the relevant details!), describe the Task (your responsibilities), explain what Actions you took to address the goal, and finally relay the Result (bonus points if you connect the dots for how this comes to bear on the company you’re interviewing for!).
I’ve found a lot of comfort in having this framework to rely on for structuring my responses, but I still worried about the content of my responses — how do I get across who I am? How can I connect with these interviewers so that we can both understand each other and take the first steps to being genuinely known?
Creating an Edge:
I recently attended a talk in the Center for Positive Organization’s Positive Links speaker series. Laura Huang spoke about the implications of her findings from her book Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage.
In my cognitive science classes, we often learn about all the ways that our brains take shortcuts, trying to cut down on the effort required to process and act on the massive amounts of information we are taking in at any given point. Being a part of an organization — or trying to become part of an organization — necessarily requires interacting with other people, usually lots of other people. Our brains often take shortcuts when it comes to appraising all of the people we meet, with Huang finding that the perceptions people have about others are about 50-60% based on stereotypes. That may seem dispiriting, but Huang reframes this statistic as an opportunity:
“That’s a lot, 50-60% based on those stereotypes. But there’s a huge 40-50% that have nothing to do with those stereotypes. When you can disentangle and understand what is underlying that for you uniquely, that’s part of where you can start to gain that unique edge and how you can actually take distinct actions that will help in your own unique way.”
Huang believes that we can each craft our unique edge by recognizing whatever disadvantages we may face, taking authentic action to address the perceptions of others, and empower ourselves in the process:
“Having an edge is about gaining an advantage, but it goes beyond just advantage. It’s about recognizing that others will have their own perceptions about us, right or wrong. When you recognize the power in those perceptions and learn to use them in your favor, you create an edge.”
Huang breaks down the concept into EDGE, offering me a new acronym to add to my interviewing frameworks:
- Enrich — First we need to be aware of the value we each uniquely bring so we can enrich the teams and organizations we’re a part of.
- Delight — When we can allow ourselves to be authentic and flexible, letting go of what we think people want from or expect of us, we can delight others, a positive sense of surprise that helps them see us for who we are.
- Guide — People are going to have perceptions about us, and if we can recognize what those are, we can take actions to guide them towards a truer sense of our best self.
- Effort — If we allocate our effort with an eye for enriching, delighting, and guiding, we enable our effort to be more efficient, so our hard work can work harder for us.
Huang’s work centers on the ability of each person to create their own edge as a way to circumvent and reclaim the adversity they face. This framework is a tool to help people take charge of their own experiences and gives people a sense of individual power that we can use as we as a society work towards systemic changes:
“When you are in the system, you need to take charge of your own outcomes. Yes, do what you can to change systems — advocate for better hiring practices, speak up for injustice, and educate others about the reality of bias. But we can’t just wait for people to make fair decisions on our behalf, make the right decisions about our future, or do things the ideal way. Creating an edge enables you to succeed within an imperfect system.”
With positive practices and DEI initiatives, we are working towards a better future for work, but we will never reach an ideal. Organizations are made up of people, and people are imperfect. But when we recognize the value we each uniquely bring and how to best communicate that to others, we are making good use of our edge.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Oct 26, 2022 | Consulting, Culture Change, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Values-Driven Leadership
Now that most of my classes have shifted back to in person, I have a bit more zoom-energy to attend webinars from organizations that hope to change the world in the same ways I do. I recently learned about Conscious Capitalism, an organization that aims to change the nature of capitalism so that more businesses “have trusting, authentic, innovative and caring cultures that make working there a source of both personal growth and professional fulfillment.” They value many social causes and the holistic wellbeing of the workforce, asserting that Conscious businesses “endeavor to create financial, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical and ecological wealth for all of their stakeholders.” In these ways, Conscious businesses embody many of the theories and practices that we see in positive organizational scholarship, and that we value at Riverbank.
In order to move towards the future they envision, Conscious Capitalism focuses on leaders to bring about change. In their recent webinar entitled “Engaging Emerging Leaders: Insights to Empower the Next Generation”, Conscious Capitalism hosted Harvard professor and former CEO of Medtronic Bill George to share his insights about what he calls authentic leadership.
In the webinar, George emphasized that organizations across the board are undergoing massive changes in leadership as the demographics of leaders shift from primarily baby boomers to the next generations. And the workforce has been shifting for a while too, as millennials make up a good portion of it and Gen Zers like me are starting to make our way into the corporate world. Throughout his points, George often reiterated the importance of leaders and organizations to be Conscious Capitalists that value issues like DEI and the environment because many of the best and brightest of the workforce who can choose where they want to work are choosing companies that align with their values.
As a Gen Z about to move from my research phase to actually applying for jobs after graduation, the values of the organizations I’m considering are factoring heavily into my choices. When I first consider a company, I start off by looking at their LinkedIn posts and the vibe of their website, trying to see the image they’re creating for themself. Are they promoting DEI efforts? Work life balance for their employees? Volunteering initiatives?
George went on to say that when it comes to conveying your organization’s values, press releases and social media posts won’t sway the talent you’re looking to attract. People will be looking at what you and your company actually do. How do your actions actually work to bring about a better world? Looking at LinkedIn posts and graphics and such can give me a good sense of the image an organization wants for themself, but to get at these issues at a deeper level, I look at things like benefits structures and development programs, and I talk with actual employees to get a sense of the lived experience in each organization.
Practicing authentic leadership that promotes your and your organization’s values is more than just something leaders ought to do — it makes plenty of business sense as well. In addition to helping to attract and retain talent, having a higher purpose, as is the first tenet of Conscious Capitalism, helps rally everyone together after a shared goal. Importantly, the quality of people’s engagement will be much higher if the goal is something they actually personally value. As George questioned, “If making money is the only mission, how can anyone get excited about that?”
As one caveat, George clarified what he meant by authentic leadership. He doesn’t just simply mean adhering to any beliefs a person might have because that could include a lot of harmful notions he’s not condoning. Instead, he restricts his definition of values to require that they be sound values, not grounded in any evil or anger. He would not consider someone leading from a place of bigotry to be an authentic leader.
When George spoke about leaders, he often referred to C-suite executives, but as he closed his talk, he advocated for leadership development to start much earlier in people’s careers. In order to develop leadership skills, George strongly believes you have to learn by doing, and you can seize opportunities to lead from anywhere in an organization: “Find a place where you can make a difference and lead now. You don’t have to have a title… Don’t wait until somebody taps you on the shoulder. Lead now. Nothing is too small to lead. So if you get the opportunity, just go do it.”
If we want to realize the world that Conscious Capitalism envisions, we’ll need leaders at all levels of organizations to bring us closer to our values. Riverbank’s Leading With Values assessment identifies the gap between the values-driven leaders you say you want to be, and how you and your leadership team is actually perceived in your organization. To learn more, email info@RiverbankConsultingGroup.com.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Oct 21, 2022 | Consulting, Culture Change, Leadership, Organizational Culture
I’m currently taking a marketing class about consumer behavior, and I got to reread one of the books that helped set me on the path I am now. In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg combines research about the brain and how people make decisions with research about individual and organizational change. He sketches out the framework of a habit loop, where there is a cue that triggers a particular routine in hopes of a reward, with the whole process being fueled by a particular craving.
As a simple example, take the habit of checking your phone. In this case, the cue might be your phone buzzing or alerting you to a notification. The routine could then be that you check your texts and send some funny gifs back and forth with your friend, resulting in a reward of a feeling of enjoyment or laughter. All of this could be fueled by a craving for distraction.
When we start considering how we might approach making changes to our habit loops, there are a few options. One possibility could be to remove the cue altogether, such as putting your phone on do not disturb, but that won’t work for all habits. Unfortunately, our brains never forget our old habits, but we can create new habits that overrule the old ones. Duhigg suggests another possibility:
“That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.”
We can all think of our individual habits, or hey, maybe they’re so automatic at this point that we can’t even think of them consciously — quick, which leg do you put your pants on first? — but habits play a big role in our organizations too. Not only do you have every individual in the organization with their own habits, and it turns out that “more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits,” but we also have organizational habits in the form of norms, which influence and reflect things like company culture.
Oftentimes, organizational norms and how they affect culture aren’t at the forefront when an organization is starting and growing. I spoke to Riverbank executive consultant Rick Haller about the change management process, and he said that there are so many things going through an entrepreneur’s mind that they have to prioritize in order to launch their business that thinking about organizational habits is something to come later: “You don’t think about that — what kind of culture am I going to build my company on? Because it’s just you! It’s just you, your values.”
As the company grows, habits and norms start to form:
“What happens is you have an organization, and it’s like it’s on a freight train. It’s a locomotive moving down the tracks. All of a sudden, you want to introduce something to that locomotive that’s got its direction. It’s puffing along and you can’t stop it. So you’ve got to start interjecting within it.”
Like Duhigg, Rick realizes that change likely won’t be effective if you try to completely overhaul the habits currently in place. And beyond just considering effectiveness, Rick acknowledges the human element of the apprehension people often have to change:
“Let’s say you wanted to bring in a new design leader with a new approach to design and you know that you’re already doing design and you have a strategy for this new process. This new designer coming in has this really magnificent process, and you want him or her to see your existing process and start inserting change within it, as opposed to saying, ‘We’re going to throw out everything you’re doing here, and we’re going to start fresh.’ People don’t like to hear that. That’s the fear of change. That’s what I’ve learned in our organization, and I think I’ve seen it more and more even as we try to implement change. Understand what they do and understand how they can tweak what they do so it isn’t so dramatic like ripping off a band aid, or something that’s not painful. And you can generally bring other people into it a lot easier that way.”
In order to enact change in organizations, we must first come from a place of understanding — understand the habit loop and appreciate what is motivating the habit. When change starts with this foundation, it can be more effective and more welcome in the organization.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Sep 29, 2022 | Culture Change, Organizational Culture, Positive Practices
When I was growing up, my parents told me that I had to choose either a sport or an instrument. I cycled through a bunch, and none of them really stuck, but in middle school, it was climbing. Dad and I would go to the climbing gym a few times a week, and gradually we started to spend most of our time bouldering. We’d obsess over problems on the wall, hoping we could figure out how to top out before the gym changed up the routes.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to the climbing gym, but I still think about the process of strategizing about my next maneuvers. Right now, the crux of the puzzle is making the leap to life after college. I’ve fallen in love with the field of positive organizational scholarship, so I’m trying to figure out ways to keep it in the forefront.
I’ve managed to get it into my head that whatever job I choose after college, it won’t determine the rest of my life. And believe me, it took me quite a while to get there. But the next thing that I’m trying to believe in with some conviction is that whatever I end up doing, I don’t need to worry about putting myself on some proverbial wrong path.
Sometimes I can get stuck thinking about the career models of the previous generations, where most people stay in one role or with one company for most of their lives — but the norm is changing as people move about to craft careers to best suit their individual needs and interests. As Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper argue in their TED talk “The Best Career Path Isn’t Always a Straight Line”, the rigidity of the classic corporate ladder can be severely limiting in some cases. They advocate instead for what they call the squiggly career:
“A squiggly career is both full of uncertainty and full of possibility. Change is happening all of the time. Some of it is in our control, and some of it’s not. Success isn’t one-size-fits-all. Our squiggles are as individual as we are.”
Climbing through a squiggly career. Illustration by Monica Haun.
At our climbing gym, there was a huge boulder in the center of the gym with routes of all different difficulties mapped onto it. Dad and I would clip on our chalk bags and try our best to figure out how to move from one hold to the next one with the same color tape. Sometimes we’d gravitate towards the same problem on the wall, but even then, our processes looked very different — I could make better use of the tiny toe holds, but he had the strength to hoist himself up on slopers.
When I’m climbing, it’s not really about getting to the top. If I were to flash every route and get to the top on my first try, I’m sure that’d take a bit of the fun out of it. But that’s not to say that there’s not value in the prescribed routes as well — at our gym, when you topped out on the boulder, you crossed a bridge to the second floor. After a while of not being able to make my way up through any of the climbing routes, I decided to take the stairs because I just had to see what was up there.
Taking the career ladder can be the right choice too. Illustration by Monica Haun.
I’ve tried to follow other people’s paths, asking at the Center for Positive Organizations’ conferences about what early career options in this field might look like, but I didn’t quite get the responses I was hoping for. Instead, many told me how they stumbled across this new field one way or another later on in their careers, and their first jobs out of college were so far removed from the work they love now.
I was a bit disappointed each time this happened — it didn’t really answer my question — but I’m starting to realize that there’s some wisdom in these responses. I’ve already waxed poetic about my love for this field, but when I talk about my struggles with trying to determine my next step forward (grasping for some elusive perfect step), my mentors are always sure to gently remind me that the important thing is to figure out what feels right as the next step for right now. That it’s okay if what I love changes over time.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that I could ever want to pursue a different field (I know — I’m young and naïve). But what if I stumble on to some other wonderful field that meshes with who I am at that point in time? I mean, I started off wanting to be a teacher like my mother, then a theoretical mathematician, and then I found my place with cognitive science, and now I’ve narrowed my focus to applying positive psychology to organizations. Given how much I believe in work’s ability to be positive and fulfilling, I hope I allow myself to explore the opportunities that excite me.
Our goals and our abilities change as we move through life and our careers. I’m starting to learn how to hold things loosely — to appreciate my relationship with them as it is in this moment, instead of trying to chart this strict path forward. We often hear about job crafting, where we figure out the ways to creatively align our values and talents with a particular role, and I think we can approach crafting careers in much the same way. The corporate ladder might be akin to the job description we get on paper, but in many ways, we have so much agency to shape our experiences, and it’s worth considering how each of us might take advantage of that.
Sometimes I would never make my way through a particular problem on the wall, but maybe I was able to add a new maneuver to my tool belt that helped me crack other routes, or maybe I just had fun trying it and flopping back onto the crash pad. By being open to the mess and play of a squiggly career, we can grow towards our goals and embrace a spirit of exploration:
“Exploring our career possibilities increases our resilience. It gives us more options, and you create more connections. We see how we can use our strengths in new ways and spot the skills that might be useful for our future. We can all start exploring our career possibilities.”
Even if I do find myself being drawn to some other field in the future, I’m grateful for the tools that I’m learning from positive organizational scholarship. While we accumulate knowledge and wisdom in everything we do, the learnings from this field are uniquely applicable to any career shift I might gravitate towards, by virtue of this field’s emphasis on improving the culture and dynamics of any organization. I’m not sure what my career will look like, but I’m looking forward to the climb.
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
by Alicia Haun | Sep 19, 2022 | Communication, Consulting, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Positive Leadership, Positive Practices
I’m starting my senior year at the University of Michigan, so I’m well versed in how most introductions go these first few months. In classes, in clubs, in meetings, we go around the room and we each have one sentence that tells everyone the basics but also nothing about us all at the same time: “I’m Alicia, I’m majoring in cognitive science and minoring in English, and I’m from San Diego.”
Like most people, I’ve grown tired of these overdone intros, plus I forget almost all the information immediately anyways. But because I’m a student of positive organizational scholarship, I know the importance of beginnings and first impressions and some ways to use your first moments with another person or a group to set the tone for the rest of the interaction or relationship. This semester, I’ve consciously made a slight shift away from the classic question of, “What are you studying?” or “What’s your major?” to a question that highlights a positive emotion: “What class are you most excited for this semester?” I usually still find out what major they are, but now we’ve tapped into another layer of connection through this new positive framing.
I first learned about this positive practice taking the form of the Center for Positive Organizations’s 30-second celebrations that kick off almost every class or meeting. Riverbank has adopted a similar focus on the importance of beginnings in the form of check-ins. We devote a good chunk of each meeting to getting to know each other. When I first joined, the other Bankies told me that during check-ins, we try to bring our whole selves to the meeting, acknowledging any good or bad thing that may be happening in our lives and affecting how we are entering into the meeting.
I spoke with executive consultant Rick Haller about his understanding of how positive practices like check-ins bring value to organizations, and his view is that “Positive practices are not just tools to improve the communication between people, but they’re tools to add value to that communication between you and I.” Repeated check-ins can give you insight into your team members — how they approach challenges, how they communicate, how they live their lives. Rick says, “If you listen to enough check-ins, you begin to understand the person that’s giving you the check-ins. And when you understand that person, you have a different connection, a much different connection. And that creates a powerful resource.”
As an example of the value of check-ins, Rick talked about his experience working on a team with a woman in her 30s whose role was to handle a special software system used throughout the organization. For many of her check-ins, she’d talk about her life on a ranch in Arizona. When he asked, Rick realized the ranch was “almost a third of the size of Yellowstone.” Through listening to her stories each meeting, Rick’s perception of her changed as he really got to understand her:
“I thought, must be hard for a young woman to work with all these crusty kinds of cowboys. Hell, she was a cowgirl herself. She was a wrangler. One day she said, ‘Oh, I had my coffee this morning and I walked out in my flip flops and there was a coyote out there.’ Coyotes are a bad thing. She said, ‘Well, I’m walking and I put my coffee down, walk in the house, and get my rifle.’ So, she got her rifle, shot the coyote, and went to work. My point is that that gave me great insight into what kind of person this woman was. She was calm, cool and courageous. She was tough. These guys, they couldn’t push her around!”
Rick realized that he’d been making assumptions about how the dynamics of the team would function, but engaging in the positive practice of check-ins helped him move past these assumptions to get a better understanding of who the woman really was and the role she could take on the team:
“So, I knew that if we had an issue that we wanted to work on, she’d be great to do that because she’s got these qualities of toughness and focus. It was great. That’s what check-ins do for you. They help you understand the people you’re dealing with in a deep way. And you share your check-ins with them so they understand what you’re like.”
In addition to helping to foster a strong sense of belonging, positive practices that help you understand your team can have serious benefits to organizations’ bottom lines as well. In his book All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Master the Most Important Skill for Success, Wayne Baker tells the story of Kent Power, an organization that was struggling with “communication across the executive-superintendent boundary.” A consultant organized an intervention where the leaders of the company all had initiate one, two, then four calls per month, for at least ten minutes each, to every other leader, but “The key rule, however, had to do with the topic of conversation: they could not talk about work. All other topics — hobbies, current events, books and movies, football, the weather — were on the table. Just not work.” The leaders then each had to upload notes on the calls to a shared drive, “so that everyone could learn about one another.”
The leaders questioned the sense of spending “hundreds of hours on the phone with one another,” where they were “never talking about work.” But the benefits were clear: “‘The end result of the game,’ says Dave Scholten, ‘was the breaking down of silos, and getting them to understand each other.’” By getting to know each other as people, the leaders were able to achieve significant results for the organization: “Asking and collaborating across such boundaries can reap measurable benefits for individuals, such as improved access to knowledge, ideas, opportunities, and other resources, which in turn elevate productivity and performance; for companies, bridging boundaries yields higher revenues and profits, more innovation, stronger client and customer loyalty, and even greater ability to attract and retain talent.”
So how well do you know the people you work with? How well do they know you? And how can you get to know each other better?
Alicia Haun is a content marketing intern at Riverbank Consulting Group. Alicia is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she also works with the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business. Alicia is passionate about the field of positive organizational psychology and looks forward to helping work become a place of flourishing.
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