We’ve been having insightful conversations with business owners about company culture. When you look around with how things get done, the way goals are achieved, the communication patterns, and the breakdowns, you have an opportunity to innovate, respond, or enhance.

There are many reasons why understanding culture is important. When you explore your company’s culture, you reveal hidden causes of breakdowns, create new efficiencies, and provide pathways to solve important issues.

Uncovering Silos

One of our mentoring clients was frustrated by their team working in silos. Each person tried to figure out things by themselves rather than tapping into the team’s collective brain power. Some of the team members expressed that they didn’t want to bring a problem to the table because they wanted to think through the problem before bringing it to the team.

Once we looked at the natural wiring of each team member and also the group’s collective wiring, they realized why the silos were happening. They liked a heads down environment where they have time alone to accomplish work or figure it out themselves. Their natural style is to be fact driven and direct where they internally process important decisions and ideas.

It’s important to understand how this collective hardwiring impacts the company’s culture. Because they were wired to want to think through things, their default behavior is to figure it out individually, causing silos and keeping ideas close to the vest.

Natural Preferences on Creating A New Company Culture

Creating awareness of both individual team member and the collective group’s natural preferences reveals the hidden ways of interacting and communicating and the impact on the company’s culture. Once you build awareness around the natural ways of doing things, you can build in action steps or processes that foster your desired company culture.

Processes that Create New Company Culture

Since the team was wired to think things through, they built in a circle-back method after meetings. When someone is naturally wired to think things through, their best ideas are about an hour after a meeting. With quiet time, they have an opportunity to sort out the information. This company built in think time for their meetings and ways to circle back with the group so that there could be more effective use of the team’s collective brain power. This new process resulted in increased cross-departmental collaboration, idea sharing, and increased levels in employee engagement. Each member of the team was able to not only get their natural needs for think time met, but then have a process in place to foster cross-departmental communication.

Invitation

For almost five years, I have offered the interactive workshop, Wired to Win! Your Path to Passion, Purpose and Profit that shows leaders how to best utilize their own human wiring and make a distinct contribution in the world. Our alumni have transformed their communications with others, built high-performance teams, and made a permanent shift in their company cultures by their participation in this workshop.

Enrollment in Wired to Win! Your Path to Passion, Purpose, and Profit is closing soon. I hope you’ll check it out with the link below.

Wired to Win! Your Path to Passion, Purpose and, Profit on August 22-23, 2019.

Create a great life,
Lisa Mininni
President, Excellerate Associates – showing thousands of business owners how to scale their business
Founder, The Business Innovation Lab, CoWorking, Executive Suites, Office and Conference Space