How to create a sustainable habit of organizational dialogue

Most professionals agree that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, as said by Peter Drucker.

Workplace culture journey is dependent on the state of dialogue.

Dialogue is critical because it gives rise to organizational self-awareness, which in turn has a multitude very real and positive outcomes -  estimated ~2x improvement in decision making,  to ~20% increase in profitability, and more (links tor research).

This article shares a perspective on:

• The challenge of building sustainable team culture
• Strategy for building a system of dialogue
• Specific recommendations and steps

Recent thinking about organizational behavior shows that many well-intentioned initiatives can backfire if approached literally. Examples include:

• Standardization of process (how do you know which standard to pick and if one size fits all is actually good?)
• Employee recognition
• Employee engagement
• Management communications

The main cause of problems is the lack of perceived appreciation of real experiences. It is not enough for a leader to say “I feel you and I see what is happening”. People require an immutable mechanism for organizational appreciation of experiences across all teams.

Grassroots can often model their participation in proposed conversations on the basis of these feelings:

• Teams want to be able to interface efficiently with other teams, but do not want their ability to innovate be held back by some common denominator
• People lose trust when only kudos are managed in a systematic way - this is because kudos ignore the bigger growth mindset picture and do not provide energy to continue the marathon

Appreciating team experiences requires a lot of leadership listening skills, but even then, these skills are not enough due to the fallibility of leaders as humans - neurodiversity, cultural and work experience history biases are a part of life. 

In the context when culture requires some repairing, leaders often make the mistake of telling people to “go and build connections”. This statement makes the leader sound weak because the reason why people are not “clicking together” is because differences in their perspectives were not mediated or bridged. It is also a bad practice to firewall the process of making execution related decisions within executive suite forums. 

The challenge of a dialogue based culture can be expressed through two questions:

• How can a leader (or an Executive group) avoid having to make decisions where people feel overridden or feel that their experiences are ignored?
• How does one structure and trigger a chain reaction of conversations that create sustainable alignment? 

The foundation of a dialogue based workplace culture consist of:

• Vibrant and asynchronous dialogue that does not fully depend on managers or HR
• Data points that trigger conversations and form a picture of systemic organizational self-awareness

Team culture building has greater chance of success when it is helped by three drivers:

• The organization adopted a process for feedback and perspective sharing - this is normally implemented by systems such as Neelix.IO
• People are introduced to the process of capturing data points in away that does not require new meetings or overheads
• A leader who can modify the habit of commencing conversations, working groups, and even town halls, by openly acknowledging immutable evidence of people’s experiences

These drivers help to solve the age-old problem of people talking at each other, instead of talking to each other.

A system of sustainable dialogue is a continuous process. The key trick is to recognise a wide range of styles, neurodiversity backgrounds, and strength of accumulated feelings (in some cases even trauma). Culture building is not about a “re-introduction” of people to each other with a hope of organic realignment. 

Successful culture building strategy can be expressed through two tenets:

1. Move away from ad hoc solution to differences in opinion - such are normally achieved through lots of talking and a willful decision at the end; This strategy is unproductive and fuels keeping up appearances, or an agreeing to disagree mental model
2. Update dialogue by injecting a reflective and data driven method for improving joint appreciation of reality ahead the forum (or at least at the start) when some issues are discussed

Dialogue itself is a human centric interaction. This interaction can be boosted by a system that helps people to triangulate on the same appreciation of reality ahead of or at the beginning of the dialogue. The same system is used for:

• mutual accountability
• inspecting if prior changes made any difference to real life experiences

The best dialogue system is the one that can provide:

• unassuming way of exchanging perspectives
• evidence of experience
• validation of how changes and decisions work out over time

The model of a “team journal” suits this purpose best because it acts as a data lake of measurable and contextual experiences, opinions, kudos, etc. These data points are pushed via a Live Pulse feedback loop model. The “push” mechanism is critical (surveys are a data “extraction” process). 

The solution selected for the team journal and live pulse models must provide psychological safety tools, analytics, benchmark dashboards, and a safe Ai Assistant to distill information at volume. It is important for data points to be pushed by people themselves (as opposed to Ai driven scanning of all emails and other messages). Ai could be a useful and fun assistant, but it should not be the backbone driver when gathering data. Data points must be explicitly expressed by people.

To ensure feedback sharing is a positive experience of feedback sharing, it is important to recognise the following factors:

• Leaders will never find enough time for 1-1s for everyone (especially in scaled organizations, as well as in remote or geo distributed setting)
• A skew towards bi-lateral conversions can degrade culture - see pitfalls explained in “Are you a listening leader in the eyes of others?”

A leader can consider two methods to facilitating feedback:

“Discrete Conversations” method:

• What it is : Feedback if is exchanged via a series of conversations, planned workshops, management notes and bilateral conversations
• Pros: Very personal and a no nonsense method that helps faster decision making
• Cons: 
• Conversations take quite some time to break through differences in perspectives because personal preferences dominate the conversation 
• It is not easy to combat bias and groupthink via “discreet conversations”; Despite the goodwill of the leader, discreet conversations are often affected by some bias - domineering voices or prior history often result in people holding back what they really think
• Cannot measure a commitment to an agreed action leader’s personal opinion or the words “let’s try and have a crack at something”
• Leader bears the full load of holding people accountable - escalations and requests to triage overwhelm the leader

“Reflective Conversations” method:

• What it is: Same forums as within the “discrete conversations” method - no need to create new types of meetings; Minor modification to the habit of creating an agenda or using evidence during the conversations - data points from team journal are used to set a scene or paint a picture of a landscape that is to be traveled through
• Pros:
• Same no nonsense approach as with the “Discrete Conversations” method
• Avoids venting and results in significantly less time taken to appreciate perspectives
• Reduces the need for traditional periodic surveys, and reduces overheads because data points and benchmarks are always available
• Writing down opinions ahead of an important conversation is a powerful approach for developing and improving critical thinking for individuals
• It is an impactful pattern for coaching people; Same data points can also be used in 1-1s and even performance reviews; Imagine a global leader traveling to some regional outpost being able to easily ascertain the trends and specifics of experiences of those who is being visited
• For leaders, it is the best way of communicating thoughts and setting of context for others to align - employees learning how a leader thinks and reflects is part of the employee engagement process; Leadership communications delivered as reflections in organizational journal are significantly more powerful than discrete emails
• Best method for avoiding toxic positivity whilst still being able to project optimism that is based on the growth mindset; This method helps to avoid risk-based and hope driven statements when communicating with people
• Naturally evidences people’s commitment to agreed action
• Team journal harnesses a network effect of holding everyone mutually accountable - this approach makes life of the leader easier because it creates a culture of self-resolvable issues without managerial escalations
• Creating a habit of premeditated and written reflection records helps people to train their brain for systems thinking - more stars can be uncovered who can transition from an individual contributor to a leader
• Culture building is a part of initiatives your firm is undertaking - it is shame not to have seamless and highly authentic storytelling of the journey; Data points created by the Live Pulse that underpins “Reflective Conversations” method provide the storytelling service completely seamlessly
• Cons:
• The pattern of considering visualizations of data points obtained from “team journal” is new for most leaders because systems that provide such capability are very new and innovative
• Asking grassroots to push data points into the ”team journal” is sometimes resisted if the purpose and process is not explained well, or if the leaders do not evidence supporting this method

Many leaders employ these patterns for facilitating interaction:

• Bi-lateral conversations, with taking down some notes
• Regular meetings with groups of people, with the assistance of some document that captures the agenda and discussed points
• Formal written communication issued as part of some management update
• Delivering a message or an update to teams, sometimes with assistance of a slide deck

Above mentioned cons of “Reflective Conversations” method can be resolved as follows:

Tip #1 

Train yourself to overcome the novelty factor of considering data points obtained from “team journal”; Think of this as a slightly deeper enrichment of an agenda

Tip #2 

Develop a habit of quickly showcasing the infographics or some other summary of people’s experiences at the start of any team sync up event; Think of this habit in following terms - If you are constantly saying that “we support transparency”, then this how talking the talk and walking the walk is evidenced in the most democratized and bias free way

Tip #3 

If you choose the right Live Pulse platforms, capture of reflective data points can be embedded into existing communications that people already accept - such as stand-downs in a communication channel, etc; This flexibility will resolve misunderstanding of the live pulse (e.g. it is not a complaints system), and also will cater for the full spectrum of qualitative and quantitative mindsets of different personalities

By adopting the right reflective thinking platform, such ad Neelix.IO, you will uncover multitudes of ways that team member reflections can be used:

• Conversations that are more productive and vibrant
• Gamification
• Reduced ritualism
• Serious analysis via advanced infographics and Ai Assistant
• Helping teams and even the whole organization re-invent themselves
• Lower overheads for facilitating systemic feedback loop

“Reflective Conversations” can uncover one “no” that is worth a thousand of “yes’s” - don’t miss out on this winning capability. "Self-awareness isn’t one truth. It’s a delicate balance of two distinct, even competing, viewpoints" - Tasha Eurich, Haley M. Wozny, Phoenix Van Wagoner, Eric D. Heggestad, Apryl Brodersen (What Self-Awareness Really Is , and How to Cultivate It)

The ultimate goal is to build organizational self-awareness, but you can always start within one or few teams. Neelix.IO provides a smart transparency capability - sharing of experiences without oversharing.