Employees do not just adapt to the behaviour patterns of the manager; they adopt them. The same applies to thinking: common beliefs arise over time in an environment where people spend half of their conscious lives. Leaders must constantly develop their thinking and skills for a qualitative team transformation.
THEORY
The corporate environment creates conditions for forming beliefs: most of us spend half of our lives in a work environment, absorbing and assimilating at the subconscious level images and meanings, which will form the basis of our logic and role models at work.
Psychologist Edgar Shane decomposed this process into three key components.
Artefacts
Artefacts or visual symbols connect us with corporate culture: presentations around the organisation, calendars appointments, stickers with reminders from colleagues, a logo in the signature of an electronic letter, the corporate code and the organisation’s standards.
Every little item works for a sense of belonging, allowing team synchronisation. People start focusing on each other and managers.
Patterns of behaviour
Sets of reactions and repetitive actions of leaders are remembered, become norms of behaviour in the organisation and are applied to new employees.
Employees unwittingly copy and distribute perceived as natural because they often encounter it. A similar behaviour model can be observed in childhood: the child repeats actions after the parents.
CASE STUDY
In one of the strategy sessions with the hotel chain team, which aims to draw up a code of values for the organisation, people broadcast similar meanings in different words, picked up, continued and complemented each other.
Ideas were floating in the air, read, accepted and cascaded from one person to another. Despite the fact that the agenda of the meeting was not agreed upon in advance, the team had no difficulty in coming to an agreement. The reason behind this was the leaders of the organisation supported and encouraged openness and exchange of views. This has become an attribute adopted in the corporate environment.
Beliefs
Our actions and thinking are intimate. Entrenched patterns of behaviour and a shared cultural environment lead to the unification of the team around common points of view. Those who do not share them remain on the periphery or naturally leave.
This is not just an environment but a whole internal value culture with law, decision-making factors and unconscious models of reactions.
Inference
It is not enough for a leader to formulate goals and an action plan to create a culture in which people would like to develop. He must be involved in the development process him/herself. Proposes, reasons, and persuades without supporting his/her own development, thinking and values, people will not believe in the significance of ideas. The team reads the patterns of worldview and behaviour at the level of meta-messages (non-verbal communication), rather than slogans.
The article is based on famous psychologist Greg McKeown work: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
