Meeting Topic
Create a Great Work Culture by Starting With YOU By Lauren Pearson
INTRODUCTION TO MEETING TOPIC:
- When we hire people, whether they are contractors or employees, how we show up, communicate and operate is crucial, and what we focus on, needs to change. Remember that your every word and action is analysed as people look to you for the standard of what ‘good’ looks like. It is up to you then to role model the behaviours you would like to see in your team.
As a business leader you interact with suppliers, partners, contractors, employees and clients on a daily basis. How you show up, how you behave and the impact you have is what determines the culture you have within your business.
As you prepare for your meeting, read the article below and consider addressing one of the following in your 60-second introduction:
- How do you make every interaction count?
- Do you feel you ‘walk your talk’ every day?
- How do you ‘own your quirk and make it work?
Create a Great Work Culture by Starting With YOU By Lauren Pearson
When we hire people, whether they are contractors or employees, how we show up, communicate and operate is crucial, and what we focus on, needs to change. Remember that your every word and action is analysed as people look to you for the standard of what ‘good’ looks like. It is up to you then to role model the behaviours you would like to see in your team.
As Idowu Koyenikan said, “The type of person you are is usually reflected in your business. To improve your business, first improve yourself!’
Whether you lead 0 people or an organisation of 10,000, your role as the founder/leader of the business determines the culture of the organisation. It is not the number of benefits available – don’t get me wrong, having massages at work and table tennis set up is great, but that is not what builds a culture. What builds a culture are the micro moments (meetings, conversations, phone calls) that you have in your eco-system, and how these leave the other person feeling. These micro moments are all about your values in action. This is truly not about what you are saying but how you behave and the impact on other people.
As a business leader, you interact with suppliers, partners, contractors, employees, and clients on a daily basis. How you show up, how you behave, and the impact you have is what determines the culture you have within your business.
Here are 5 areas of focus for founders/owners and business leaders, with the common theme being about how you lead yourself and how you decide to ‘show up’ in every interaction and in every decision. You can’t grow your business and deliver true value without building deep relationships and showing people that you care about them and what is important to them. Critically, understanding the other person’s motivations, interests, and needs starts to build authentic and trusting business relationships.
Build Trust and Establish Credibility
Treating every project or engagement as your own will help you to establish trust and credibility. This is down to the language you use, and it is down to being able to introduce clients to another supplier if they are a better fit. The client must feel that they can trust you to do what is best for them. This means putting the client first. Even though it might cost you in the short term, this will pay dividends in the long run.
Make Every Interaction Count
Every interaction is an opportunity to create a fan of your business. Word of mouth referrals are a powerful source of leads, and if you have a positive impact on every person who interacts with your business, they join your informal marketing team.
Relationship First, Transaction Last
When you meet a warm lead, approach that conversation with the consideration of what your business can do to serve that person or how can you help solve a problem builds deeper, more lasting relationships instead of ‘what’s in it for me’? This requires you to get to know them, find out what is important to them, ask about what they do outside of work, what interests they have and what problems they are grappling with. This takes time to build authentically, so be patient.
Walk your Talk
Staying true to your values as a business owner (both personal and professional values), means that you need to make the right decisions for the right reasons. This may mean choosing to no longer work with a client if there is a misalignment of values. It may mean being willing to hire different people into your business and to farewell people who are not aligned to your business any longer. This can be costly both in terms of money and in terms of time and personal stress. The right decision for the business remains the right decision.
Own your Quirk and Make it Work
People buy from people they like. We are not everyone’s cup of tea, and that is ok. We cannot be who we are not. There is no choice but to show up as the best of who we are. This means owning your quirk and making it work for you. Successful people are often those who embrace that part of themselves that makes them unique – think Jermain Clement, Taika Waititi, Dame Denise L’Estrange-Corbet and Francis Hooper, for example
Having an abundance mindset, where you know that there is enough work for us all – that we will find our tribe and serve the clients we need to serve – will ensure that our approach is built on generosity of spirit and strong partnerships. If you are a real estate agent, promote painters and builders. If you run a wine shop, promote the deli down the road. Find businesses you love, get to know them and figure out how to promote each other’s products or services. This is a win/win and leads to multiple successes.
Lastly, when entering into a conversation with a new connection, find common ground first. Determine which connections, knowledge, or skills will serve the person in-front of you. Approaching these conversations with generosity leaves a lasting impression and says a lot about the culture you have within your business. Then, follow through with your commitments to build trust, which is the foundation for all great interactions.
If you’d like to know more about how Lauren helps her clients, check out her website: https://www.cultofmonday.com
Next Meeting Topic – MINDSET PILLAR
INTRODUCTION for meeting topic:
- Do you know where your mindset (your natural ‘wiring’) comes from? The article below, contributed by Erena Oliver, provides a bit of explanation as well as 3 key questions you can ask yourself to ensure you stay in a Growth Mindset and support your success. As you prepare for your 60-second intro this week, consider sharing what YOU can do to support a Growth Mindset in your life and work.
We have 2 core mindsets – growth (pleasure) and protective (pain) which helps us to determine where we are or where we’d rather be!
At the end of the year, I look ahead to the new year. I look at the lifecycle I am in, the energy of the year, and how my different performance patterns could be challenged in the year or months ahead…this helps me identify the mindsets that will be beneficial in each area of my life as well as the pitfalls I could encounter along the way.
This means I begin the year with a mindset for success, a mindset to stay in the growth aspects of my life. I also have prior warning of where I could face challenges, and in the case of my relationships, who I could face challenges with and when those might occur.
The point of reflecting on our mindset is to make our lives easier, simpler and more fun – oh! – and to improve ourselves! Wouldn’t you agree?
Learning the behaviour patterns created in both our Growth Mindset and Protective Mindset empowers us to discover our highest driving needs, which are necessary for us to enhance our performance, evolve our experience of life and realize our full potential.
Our everyday life is driven by these two modes – seeking growth or pleasure and protection or the avoidance of pain. And it’s ‘wiring’ that stretches all the way back over our evolutionary development.
Were you aware that you can only be in one mode at a time? The same as a car cannot be in reverse and drive at the same time. We use the metaphor of a car to describe these modes representing the Human Mindset, so you’re either in a Growth Mindset (drive) or a Protective Mindset mode (reverse/stationary) at any given time.
Our protective (reactive) behavioural patterning is completely natural and a normal human experience. We’re wired for survival, to protect ourselves from experiencing pain. We’re also wired for pleasure – it just depends on what we want to experience, and that depends on our perspective of what it all means to us and what we believe is POSSIBLE.
From the moment we were conceived, we started to receive information (conditioning) via emotional and intellectual stimuli from our mother and father. We come equipped with a pre-set pattern of neurological wirings that aren’t entirely ours, rather a mesh of emotional impulses and intellectual belief systems. They’re a bit like a playlist of songs – some of which we may not even like or want.
The external conditioning continues when we look towards our parents for acknowledgement of what is appropriate and okay via our Human Operating reward system, (also called the dopamine response – or dopamine being released by observing our mother’s and father’s facial and emotional expressions).
This gets further cemented when we enter an educational system which says only those who “fit in” (conform) are deemed good enough and so we continually look toward external environmental standards to measure ourselves against. In essence, we set ourselves up for failure – and our mindset takes a hammering.
Albert Einstein was right when he said, “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, then it will live its whole life thinking it’s stupid”.
It is important to have healthy evaluation models that are integral to our entire experience of life so that we all may know what our own individual, full spectrum of potential is and how to harness its talents and abilities.
Remember the two modes: –
Growth Mindset, Pro-Active: “generating a fulfilling and pleasurable experience of life.”
Protective Mindset, Re-Active: “patterns indicating something lacking from one’s experience.”
Typically, we are not given the evaluation tools in our development to understand:
- The hallmarks of our unique growth mindset and protective mindset
- Our unique driving needs – those things that are necessary for us to feel fulfilled and valued
- Or how to interrupt and stop our dysfunctional habit patterns that keep us stuck so that we can consciously create new mindsets to support our continued growth, fulfilment and success throughout life.
We end up putting ourselves under excessive pressure – often judging ourselves and putting ourselves down when we don’t live up to conditioned societal expectations. And this is because we don’t really know what’s normal or not normal for our experience. So we rely on other people, or other external validation to set the standard. The trouble is, there’s not one standard, there are many!
If you’re following me so far, you will now know that behaviour has two modes, and that these modes are driven by energy linked to our emotional states, (energy in motion), but that’s where most people stop.
Few are asking the questions, “What’s driving that emotional state?” and “Why does mindset so often let us down?”
All emotions and behaviour are driven by our needs. What mostly bothers us is the challenge of learning to generate, fulfil, achieve, and satisfy our own needs.
When you shift to generating your own needs instead of waiting for the environment to feed them back to you, means you step into the driver seat! You’re in control and accountable for your own:
- choices
- decisions
- experiences
You’re not externalising or placing the responsibility on other people or things.
This is the essence of self-leadership – knowing the full spectrum of your potential and the ability to self-disrupt your own Protective Mindset patterns before you self-destruct and feeding your Growth Mindset to help you achieve your goals.
To help you sustain a Growth Mindset, allow these 3 questions to guide your decisions, actions and what you say:
- “Is it good for me?”
- “Is it good for others?”
- “Does it serve the greater good?”
These 3 simple questions will help keep you in alignment and sustaining a Growth Mindset and behaviour patterns.
Remember, there will always be two sides to experiencing your unique needs – either empowering or disempowering. An aligned mindset will support us to reconnect with our Growth Mindset when we falter – which we will do because we are human.
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