Mapping the emotional culture of teams
Can you recall working in a team where, for most of the time it just felt like a great place to be? A time where coming to work was something you really looked forward to, when working with your colleagues was just, easy, straightforward, a time when you felt you and the team achieved a huge amount?
Can you recall working in a team, where for most of the time it felt the opposite of that?
It’s a question I have been asking as part of a recent series of emotional culture workshops I have been facilitating with a range of different teams using The Emotional Culture Deck (ECD). The purpose has been to:
1. Map the current emotional culture of the team
2. Explore and agree what the team emotional culture needs to be in order for it to be successful
3. Assess the gap between 1 and 2
4. Agree a team charter to close the gap (if necessary), build, maintain and strengthen their desired emotional culture
The ultimate outcome being to enable the team to enhance its performance, productivity and quality through ensuring its members feel good, can function well and have a positive day to day experience.
Sounds straightforward, but of course the reality of undertaking that journey with a team is often complex, challenging and uncomfortable at times. It requires some courage on behalf of the team, it’s leadership and the wider organisation, however the rewards can be significant, teams can feel liberated, the ‘unsaid’ can finally become ‘said’, healing and growth can begin. Teams with an already strong and positive culture can go on to achieve even more.
I set out at a recent workshop to achieve purpose steps 1 to 4. Here is a summary of how it went.
Workshop participants could with relative ease describe what it felt like to be part of what they regarded as a great team. They were asked to all choose one word from the Emotional Culture Deck that best described that feeling.
In some cases, they remembered that team experience with real fondness and for some it was indicative of being in their current team. When describing that experience people’s energy levels were enhanced, the atmosphere in the room was buzzing, participants loved talking about how they had felt and what they achieved as a consequence. Well they would, it all sounded great!
That, as you might expect all changed when participants chose words to describe the opposite experience:
For some that was difficult, recalling their feelings was emotional, it took them back to a particular time and place. This was for some a reasonably neutral experience, whereas for others it was the first time they had spoken about what had obviously been a very tough time. Energy levels declined in the group, people became distracted and withdrawn.
Next steps were to use the ECD to map out the feelings individual team members stated were important to them to feel and to not feel in order for them to be successful. This led to discussions on emotional triggers with participants exploring what behaviours certain feelings triggered in them and what the impact of those behaviours were, or could be, on their colleagues. We used these insights to explore the wider team dynamics.
Discussions around exploring the perceived gaps between the current team emotional culture and the desired one were by their nature more challenging and I have often found this to be the case with teams who at this point are hesitant as they individually assess the level of risk to them in speaking up with honesty. However this in itself is useful as it exposes this hesitancy, it can be felt and observed by all the participants and prompts me as facilitator to ask a powerful question.
How safe is it to speak up in this team?
This leads and in this case led to lengthy discussions on the importance of trust and psychological safety in building team cultures of learning and improvement and it was really pleasing to observe the teams focus on this and how much it went on to underpin every aspect of their team charter.
My key learnings and reflections:
I have often tried to achieve too much in too little time and have recognised the need to pace the workshop more appropriately to the needs of the team, checking in with them more often.
To not underestimate the risk that some team members may feel they are taking in talking about how they feel. The sense I continually have is that they want to take that risk, that they intuitively feel they need to open up a little. This is made so much easier when the team leader fully participates in the workshop and role models positive and reinforcing behaviours.
Exploring team members emotional triggers and responses proved to be a very powerful aspect of the workshop and led to significant insight, not only into individual behaviours but also into how the team collaborate, connect and include.
Team members may still be experiencing an emotional ‘hangover’ from their time with a previous team and/or employer and this will likely impact on their mindset and behaviours in their current role. They may not even be aware of this. Emotional (positive and negative) contagion can spread among the wider team. The Emotional Culture Deck Workshop can really help unlock this. The process enables insight, reflection and self-awareness. The workshop provides a structured environment and the ECD provides the emotional language which has proved so important in enabling participants to articulate and explore their feelings.
What has surprised me has been the willingness of workshop participants to share their feelings, to be vulnerable and I have found that even the most cynical participants have begun to engage positively as the workshop process unfolds. There is something to be said for the team embarking on this journey together, in the same way and at the same time.
Working relationships are enhanced when we experience each other being vulnerable. We have at those times an opportunity to listen, to demonstrate compassion and empathy and if we grasp the opportunity to be 'present' and live that moment with a colleague, we can build trust between each other and co-create that sense of psychological safety. Teams can then take a step towards creating an emotional culture where its members can more often feel the way they need to in order to flourish and thrive at work, achieving success for themselves and the wider organisation.
The whole process is significantly enhanced through coaching and upon reflection the teams that have most embedded their learning from the workshops and really brought their charter to life have been those that have followed up with team coaching and in the case of the team leader 121 coaching.
In this article I have just tried to provide an overview of the workshop and some of my recent reflections but if you want to know more do get in contact and if you liked the look 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