Building a family charter
It was after a few days into lockdown with my family when I realised that we were going to need to step up our game if we were to come out the other side of this relatively intact. I had just finished re-reading Patrick Lencioni’s excellent book ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ and one of his summary statements describing team work really resonated with our family situation:
“Teams succeed because they are exceedingly human. By acknowledging the imperfections of their humanity, members of functional teams overcome the natural tendencies that make trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and a focus on results so elusive”
So here we were, ‘Team Hargreaves’, at home together in unusual circumstances experiencing each other at our most ‘exceedingly human’. The imperfections of our humanity were beginning to show!
In my professional life I work with organisations, leaders and teams, helping them build the right emotional culture. A culture that recognises how central emotions are to building teams characterised by productivity, performance, engagement, satisfaction and quality. One of the ways I go about helping others to build those cultures is through using the Emotional Culture Deck so whilst I was only too aware that bringing work techniques home to family situations can be a risky business and not always welcomed, it felt right to have a go.
Fortunately, Team Hargreaves were receptive, although I think I promised (tongue firmly in cheek) that it would be a 10-minute activity with plenty of chocolate available.
It’s important to note that my son and daughter are 10 and 8 years old respectively so I wasn’t sure how engaged they would be. My wife is a similar age to me, but let’s leave that there.......
The objective was to help us all develop a greater understanding of each other’s feelings, how they influenced our behaviours and to agree a family charter to enable us all to help each other feel the way we want to feel more often during this difficult and unsettling lock down period.
So, this is what happened.
Each of us had an Emotional Culture Deck (and plenty of snacks) and we sorted our cards into the black pile and the white pile and picked out two further cards. The red card which states 'I don’t want to feel this (but I might from time to time)' and the green card which states ‘It’s important I feel this’.
The first activity was to individually go through the black cards identifying the feelings that each of us felt were important for us to feel. The next step is for each person to reduce those further to their top 5 feelings, the ones that are the most important to feel, ranked in order from 1 – 5. Not an easy task to do. When we had all completed that we shared our top 5 with each other explaining what those feelings were and why they were important to us. This is so important to do as this is where the real learning and insight occurs. It required us to really listen to each other - not something we are always very good at in our family.
We then repeated the same exercise but using the white cards to identify the emotions we don’t want to feel.
We also went on to talk about what happens when we do feel the things we want to and when we don’t. How do we behave and what impact does our behaviour have on others? This was really useful and did lead to some genuine light bulb moments for my wife and I about our children and our own responses to situations and behaviours that arise.
My children did struggle with understanding some of the words on the cards but what my wife and I realised was that this led to great conversations around us all trying to understand the words, describe the emotions and to give examples of when we have felt these things.
It’s not that easy to describe a feeling, it can be quite a complex concept but working through it with two children was a great way to help them develop their emotional language and for us as parents to gain greater insight into them, to understand what drives some of their behaviours and to consider what we can do to influence them positively.
The third part of the activity was for all of us to agree a family charter in order to keep us all on track. We asked ourselves the following question:
What should we all agree to do to help each other feel the way we want to feel as much as possible?
We all added our thoughts to Post-its, and then put it all together into our ‘Family Charter’.
That 10-minute ‘promise’ was well and truly broken but it was an hour or so very well spent and we have referred to our charter often and agreed to go through the activity again to see how we are all doing. It even inspired my daughter to draw her own chart of emotions.
I share this with you because it has really helped us. We have not lived the charter every hour of every day, because slipping up and getting it wrong is normal, but we have tried hard and we have all definitely been the better for it.
We all agreed that ‘be kind’ was the most important thing we could all be and that if we got that right, the rest was more likely to follow. Not a bad philosophy. It will do for me.
If you liked the sound of The Emotional Culture Deck, there are a few ways you can you learn more about it:
Download a free Lo-fi PDF version of the deck at the website, click here
Download the #emotionalcultureworkshop for free here (yes for free, but I can also facilitate this workshop for you and your teams if you wanted some help).
You can go through The Emotional Culture Masterclass (like I did), click here for more info.
If you still have questions, feel free to contact me, Steven Hargreaves - steve@thecompassionateleadership.company