Fired Up, Connecting, and Win a Book
January 29, 2008 by David Zinger
Filed under Business
This is a guest post from Michael Lee Stallard author of Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity, and Productivity. At the end of his article you will have the opportunity to win the book this post is based on.
Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.
Foster connections. A “Connection Culture” exists when people feel connected to their work, to the people they work alongside and to their organization’s mission, values and/or reputation. Connection is part rational but mostly emotional in nature.
Connection cultures. All great leaders foster connection and all great teams, business units, organizations and nations have Connection Cultures. Why? Because Connection Cultures meets universal human needs that help people and organizations thrive. These needs include respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning.
The formula. The formula to create a Connection Culture is Vision + Value + Voice = Connection. Vision exists whey people are motivated by the mission, united by their values and proud of their reputation. Value exists when people feel valued and when they value others. Voice exists when people are informed and when decision-makers seek and consider their opinions and ideas. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s common sense, yet uncommon in practice. That’s why 75 percent of employees are not engaged in their jobs and the work environments they are in are sucking the life out of them.
Character strengths. Another discovery we made in our work was that Vision, Value and Voice can be further broken down into character strengths. For example, Voice exists in an organization when its employees have character values such as open-mindedness, humility, curiosity and love of learning. As it turns out, the character values we linked to Vision, Value and Voice are the same character values that social scientists believe favored the survival of people throughout history and have been celebrated by moral philosophers and religious thinkers over time. Our work shows that these character values are so powerful simply because they meet human needs that must be met in order for people to thrive, individually and collectively.
Intentional connection. The bottom line is that if you want to thrive in work and in life you must be intentional about helping to create a Connection Culture around you. Connection applies to sports teams, community organizations and families too. No one thrives for sustained periods of time without it.
Click here to read Michael Stallard’s new blog.
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Win Michael’s Book.
Michael has been generous to offer slacker manager readers the opportunity of receiving a free book directly from him. To be eligible please post a comment about how you stay connected to your work, others, or your organization.
We will use a random number generator to choose the winner from everyone who contributed a comment. The book award for the comments will close on Friday and the winner will be announced next Tuesday.
David Zinger
Immoral Organizational Behavior. Forget business, core to social and personal ethics is the need and want to take part in and connect to your culture. If you deny it, you create a morally bankrupt organization.
A simple think I try to do is ensure that every meeting has a connection aspect. It can be as simple as asking everyone how they’re doing, asking who’s seen the latest movie, or some sort of simple ice breaker. The rules I use are everyone must be present, and it can’t be related to the meetings purpose. It only takes a few minutes and you can visually see peoples attitudes and behaviors change once they have made an initial connection.
We typically start meetings at our company with a quick “check in” with everyone. It is about how life is going for each person, not projects, timelines or tasks. We connect personally before diving into business.
Similar to the prior reply, you can see people drop in, get connected, and get back in the zone as we go through the check in.
When we skip this quick step, a lot of times meetings take longer, peoples’ minds are not as focused, and it is more common for people to be stressed out and frustrated with each other…overall, less productive. Connections are important and make us more effective.
IT may seem silly, but to keep things on an even keel with the other women in the office, I send out an occasional funny email (once a month or less) and I make a point of walking out with them to breathe or chat while they smoke. It’s not much, but it keeps me in the loop even though I am in another part of the building.
All my career I’ve worked at a distance from clients, first by phone, now by email and IM, but still a lot by phone. I maintain strong connectivity by being ultra-available. Clients contact me for quick help or just to chat and de-stress. I’m a big fan of laughter and find it easy to make happen.
I work from home most of the time which makes it appear to be more difficult to stay connected. I, however, do not find that not to be the case. The way to stay connected is to be “available” and “responsive”. I respond to ALL email and voice mail within four hours. I feel totally connected this way.
There are a lot of things that really build connections at our workplace. We have a training problem specifically for doing this where people build skills as an individual but then practice it and demonstrate it to the team. EVERYONE holds each other accountable and we have continual discussions about this which definitely builds close connections between people.
Another is having an active social club outside the office where the company sponsors a monthly event and get together. We also have a monthly social luncheon for the whole company.
Keeping other personal connections alive is done as part of our management team’s main focus to work through others. Regular one and ones at every level of the organization and an attitude in having each person be responsible for teaching things and working with anyone more junior than them is also very important.
The chance for a book is now over.
Charlotte Babb won by submitting a comment and having her number chosen through a random number generator that included the number of all who offered comments. On behalf of Michael and myself, thank you for your comments.
David
Hello!
I think this try.