Using the emotional culture deck to reconnect and rebuild post restructure

In my experience when you remove profit as the key metric on which to judge the success of an organisation, you have to go all-in on purpose and, as such seem to attract people that are much more personally aligned to this purpose. This is evident in all of the not-for-profit organisations I’ve had the privilege to work with to date. The downside to having an aligned, passionate and ‘mission-driven’ team however that when you need to reshape and, at times, reduce that team to stay future fit, it can feel like you are messing with the very core of what the organisation stands for. This was true for the Auckland-based not for profit I recently worked with. 

I was engaged to help rebuild and reconnect following the most significant restructure the team had been through and it was clear there was a lot of pain, a lot of trepidation and a lot of questioning of the purpose for those left. Using the emotional culture deck I worked with the leadership team to define how they wanted their people to feel and not feel at work and the behaviours, rituals and actions that they could create, change, kill or keep that would enable this culture. Here’s a step by step guide as to how we did this…

We ran this as a half-day workshop with the full leadership team, 11 people in total. They had literally come out of a meeting where the restructure was still very much top of mind and it was clear many of them were carrying this into the workshop. As we had a bit of time to kill while everyone gathered, I asked each participant to draw their story on a card, not a planned step, but in hindsight a key one. Without much of a brief, I was blown away by the creativity shown and how this simple task can help people start letting go of whatever is playing on their mind as they come into the room. We had everything from Narwhales to husbands running on distant mountains, we learnt that people were in the midst of buying and selling houses, that others had given up a comfortable life to build other people houses overseas, we learnt what made people tick which, not surprisingly, was almost always something to do with family and/or nature and within 10 minutes we were reminded that we are far more than our ‘jobs’. 

But back to the agenda. I based the workshop of the map your emotional culture – workshop plan (which you can download for free here). I won’t go into each step where I followed this plan exactly but there were a couple of places where I took a slightly different path. In workshops like these, I think time is always a factor and we try to skip parts to ‘fit it all in’. If nothing else, my advice would be to not skip the icebreaker, easily the most powerful part of the whole day. I asked people to share a feeling they had had in the last 7 days and why they felt that way and very quickly people were vulnerable, voiced concerns, celebrated wins, supported each other. I don’t think you can rebuild without reconnecting and the icebreaker was the catalyst for this connection. 

After the group had defined the top five things they wanted to their people to feel, individually, then in small groups of 3-4 we then narrowed this down to the top five across the wider group. At this stage, knowing time would be an issue, I used the a 1-5 scale for each of the top five things we wanted our people to feel and got each person to add a dot for each feeling based on where they thought the organisation was today (5 being all of our people feel like this all of the time and 1 being most people don’t feel this at all). This helped up hone in on the top 3 we needed to work on for the remainder of this section of the workshop.

Each team then took one of these three feelings and worked through what are the things we do that drives this feeling, what will not help our people feeling this and what rituals and action should be keep, change, kill or create in order to create this environment. We grouped the ideas into themes and then dot voted on the themes that were most important. I think we’ve all been involved in workshops where the session was great, we had some good ideas but we lack follow-through. When that is the case, we have to ask, what impact has the investment really had. To combat this, once we’d identified the critical actions, we used a very simple project canvas where the team prioritised three changes they wanted to make assigned an owner and a booked in the first next step, in order to help their team feel inspired, connected and supported.  

We then repeated the above process on the things we didn’t want our people to feel, including using the 1-5 scale to help focus attention. On this side the team only selected a top four things they didn’t want their people to feel, there wasn’t an obvious 5th so there is no point forcing it. A great reminder to do what feels right for your context not what a workshop plan says. 

We closed out the session by each selecting a card which described how they were feeling in that moment as a result of going through the workshop together. And the team then topped it off by all standing and singing the most epic Waiata together. I still get goosebumps when I watch it back.

Here’s what the client had to say about this process…

“It has been a tough few months for a lot of us in this organisation but the session helped make things feel more hopeful and possible. We are a tough bunch with lots of very interesting personalities but you worked very well keeping all of us on track, whilst making it fun, almost like weaving a magic carpet with multi coloured, wool of different thickness and quality. We want to know investigate how best to use this carpet moving forward.” Project Sponsor

This post was originally published on LinkedIn