Get Connected. It’s the key to cultural change. Part 1 – Connect to ME
These blog posts explore the lens of building ‘connection’ as a model to guide cultural transformation for teams and organisations.
We live in connected times, in which technology allows us to be connected at all times – even in the air now – with virtually everyone in our working and private lives. At the same time, ironically, we are more disconnected than ever before – from ourselves and from each other. We see this in individuals, teams, organisations, families and communities, in which feelings of isolation, mental health issues, relationship breakdowns, stress related illness and dysfunctional team cultures are more common than they’ve ever been. Sound familiar?
Connection – real, human connection – is at the heart of the human organisation. Connection characterises great leadership and therefore is at the heart of any thriving workplace culture.
In much of my work in recent years, I have used the model shown here – adapted from the Barrett Values Centre ‘Get Connected’ model – as a road map to simplify some of the complexity and multi-faceted considerations around connections that exist when navigating cultural change.
The model guides the discovery and learning journey toward a healthy team culture and a thriving organisation through focus on four cornerstones: ‘Connect to Me’, “Connect to Us’, ‘Connect to our Reality’ and ‘Connect to Our Learning’.
In Part 1 of this post I will focus on the first of the four cornerstones “Connect to Me”.
Connect to Me
This is all about personal leadership. Who am I? What matters to me? What is my core motivation? My passions? My strengths? My preferences? It’s about taking personal responsibility.
What does this mean in the context of living a purposeful life?
What does this mean in the context of my role, the team and organisational culture?
It’s about developing self-awareness, capacity for reflection and developing the confidence to share your whole self at work. It’s about feeling psychologically safe so that you can challenge norms and exhibit new ways of being. It’s about learning to be present with others and to listen without judgement or need to comment. It’s about sharing from a place of realness and vulnerability and having others witness you on your personal discovery journey.
When you undertake this personal development with your manager and team members, you build confidence to bring ‘more of who you really are’ to work and thereby the ability to share your unique gifts in service of the team and organisation. You understand each other at a whole new level and that connection brings healthier ways of working straight back to the workplace.
For a leader, the ability and willingness to bring your real self, warts and all, to your work – to be ‘comfortable in your own skin’ – is powerfully reassuring to others. It gives others permission to do the same, each building their own individual ‘connection to me’. This is great leadership in action.
“When we begin listening to each other and when we talk about the things that matter to us, the world begins to change” (Margaret Wheatley – Turning to one another, page 13)
The movement toward a healthy team culture and a human organisation is built on members of that team taking personal responsibility for expanding their self- awareness and capacity in the context of the role, team and organisation. The Connect to Me model provides a roadmap for this personal learning.
In Part 2 and 3 of this blog post series I explore the other three cornerstones of connection: Connect to Us, Connect to our Reality and Connect to our Learning.
