Playing bad cop & getting pointy to create a positive culture shift - The importance of the Emotional Culture Deck follow up

A few months ago I posted about my ‘day in a life’ learnings on my journey to be a pro-elephant rider facilitator of the ‘Emotional Culture Deck’ (ECD) Workshop. Since then I’ve facilitated quite a few workshops and with each one I am amazed at the potent, conscious punch this little deck of cards can pack when it comes to the awareness of how emotions lead to outcomes in the workplace. 

Hold it there though and back the truck up a little – although the deck is amazingly useful it’s worth remembering it’s just the beginning of a cultural journey, not a one stop shop, and one cool workshop does not a lasting change make. As much as it’s a great way to get teams collaborating and understanding each other it’s not necessarily going to give you the long-term shift in outcomes without some more work and attention. Sorry if that’s a bit of let down but changing outcomes effectively requires ongoing change effort. In the case of the ECD process this is all about the emphasis and consideration that is placed on the power of human emotions and the practical steps you take going forward. 

The initial ECD workshop is indeed the first step but there is still work to be done. You can add a spark to light the fire but whether or not it continues to burn is all about how you stoke and tend to it.

The initial workshop using the ECD is that ‘spark’, it’s a great wake-up call when it comes to why we should even have a conversation about all this emotions and feelings malarkey, and also how to do it in a tangible, pragmatic and non ‘awkward’ way. Particularly for those people that find the whole subject of talking about feelings a bit icky. 

However, then what? Where to after the initial ECD workshop?

Here are my top tips and advice on how to follow up and follow through, so you continue to stoke and tend to the flames, thus ensuring the emotional culture continues evolving in the right direction.  

1.     Make time for the follow up workshop

Do NOT avoid or skimp on running the follow up session. As I’ve done more workshops I’m realising more and more how crucial the follow up is. This really is where positive change starts to get nice and sticky. The first workshop starts the conversation, creates the buzz, brings attention to why emotions matter, and gets intentional about what the team wants its emotional culture to look like. It gets things off the starting blocks at a strong pace. There is also still some work done towards the end of the first workshop on brainstorming actions, however by this stage participants are often tired and actions can tend to be quite vague, easily distracted and maybe even a little half-hearted as energy wilts. A big part of the follow up workshop is about gaining accountability and creating action, so the team own their emotional culture and get cracking on doing the work to cultivate the desired feelings and minimise the undesired feelings they identified as key to their success during the first session. With time being at a premium in most workplaces it’s a good idea to book the follow up session in at the same time you book in the initial workshop so it’s locked and loaded in peoples diaries.  

Run the follow up 4 weeks later – much less than that and there isn’t enough time to reflect on the conversations and outputs from the first workshop. If the follow up session is dragged out much later than 4 weeks you’re at threat of losing momentum on the good work you have started.

2.     Keep the conversation and momentum flowing between workshops

In the gap between the first and second workshop pull out the stops to keep the conversation going around the ECD in terms of 

·      Take outs from the first workshop

·      What landed and what didn’t 

·      How the deck and its associated tools can be embedded going forward

·      Keeping the awareness on desired and undesired emotions 

I immediately gather feedback on the session from participants via an online survey to gauge how they found it. I also ensure I send out collated notes from the session within a couple of days, before populating the Emotional Culture Canvas, to ensure it’s a representative view of what was discussed and agreed in the workshop. This is important as the workshop is kept moving at pace to ensure participants don’t lose interest but which can also result in there not always being time to go over and confirm the detail of what was discussed other than confirming the agreed top 5 desired and undesired feelings. The facilitator will likely end up with a gazillion ‘post-its’ that attempt to record some amazing quality conversations but the notes themselves are often high level and lack context.  These need to be translated quickly and sent out for review to ensure there is alignment and nothing is missing or incorrect. Sending notes out also acts as a great reminder and summary of the session, prompting participants to continue to contemplate and discuss the session. 

3.     Create themes to help focus actions

As mentioned the ECD follow up workshop is very focused on action and accountability. Sounds easy huh? Yeahhhh nahh. Getting teams pinned down to tangible actions that they commit to owning is hard yards.  As someone who has spent a fair chunk of my working career driving change and transformation – this is pretty common. Actioning the unknown is a tricksy little number.  In the case of the ECD this is usually because people in the workplace haven’t spent time focusing on the area of emotions and the impact of emotions on behaviour, culture and performance and thus probably not considered ideas and actions around this area before. I’ve found a trick that can really help is to consider key themes coming through to focus action planning.   

Here’s how to identity the themes relevant to the team you are working with. 

When reviewing the outputs of the first workshop, (i.e. going through those gazillion post-its), start to look for the recurring themes coming up. It’s not hard as they are usually pretty obvious – for example there is usually a theme around ‘Communication’ (that old chestnut comes up pretty much every time). Other themes I’ve noticed are ‘Collaboration’, ‘Having fun / play at work’, ‘Reward and Recognition’, ‘Planning’, ‘Accountability’ and / or ‘Decision Making’ and even ‘Being Present’ (you would be surprised at how often not paying attention to others, or being distracted comes up as a behaviour to squash desired feelings and cultivate undesired feelings - or maybe you wouldn’t).  

Another option in regards to coming up with themes is to suggest the team review the notes of the first workshop, together, and decide the recurring themes themselves. The benefit of doing it this way is they are already increasing their accountability and ownership and it also helps keep the conversation flowing between workshops as mentioned in tip 2 above.  Ideally there should be no more than 5 themes – once the themes are agreed they act as a strong catalyst for creative action planning in the follow up workshop.

Note – another thing you can use these themes for is ongoing pulse checks around them to see how your tracking or including them in your staff engagement surveys in some way.

4.     Be intentional but also fluid 

Have clear intentions on what you want to achieve in your ECD follow up workshop. Here are objectives I usually focus on in the follow up:

• Brainstorm and agree the top 5 to 6 critical actions you will take as a team to support your desired emotional culture - these need to be specific, easy to interpret and achievable
• Further strengthen team culture by the team building further understanding of each other through personal insights from the last session - including sharing some of their “know yourself handbook” reflections (homework from the first ECD workshop)
• Agree Emotional Culture Canvas - as it stands following the first workshop (which is basically confirming the notes and any feedback / updates received)
• Confirm where to from here - once canvas and actions agreed discuss how to adopt this and keep it alive as part of day to day workplace culture.

Keep these objectives front of mind and if time gets away with you cut out reviewing the canvas based on the assumption everyone has reviewed the notes from session one which validates it. The number one thing to ensure you have achieved by the end of this follow up workshop is the top 5 to 6 critical actions the team are going to take and start working on straight away. It’s not that the other things aren’t important but the actions are where the positive change will come and start to embed.  

Timing wise allow 90 minutes to 2 hours for the follow up (you will need it) 2 hours is best and if you finish early it’s the gift of time back in diaries. 

5.     Play bad cop and get pointy when it comes to actions

As mentioned, the ECD follow up workshop is all about accountability where you get really pointy on the top 5 to 6 critical actions the team are going to take to positively shift the emotional culture. The role of the facilitator becomes a slightly harder gig here and where you really have to drive the participants. In fact the facilitator role morphs into also being a coaching role from an action planning perspective.  I’ve had it played back to me by people I’ve worked with that this is where “Lotty plays bad cop” as the facilitator. It was said tongue in cheek, but it’s sort of true. In the first workshop I found the role of  facilitator reasonably easy and pretty light hearted. I mentioned in my recent blog ‘Day in the life of the Emotional Culture Deck Workshop’ that the workshop almost runs itself with the help of the physical deck, and as the facilitator I’m just there to gently steer the participants through it. I’ll keep their energy up, encourage them and guide them through the process – but all the work is done by the participants and insights bubbles up pretty easily. In essence I’m ‘good cop Lotty’ in the first workshop just cheerleading and gently steering them through. During the second workshop however I have to pull out the big guns on my facilitation skills and really pin them down on what they are actually going to do that’s most important, who’s going to do it and when.  Getting groups to come up with pointy, specific actions is not easy – there are a few little seedlings of actions from the first workshop but often they find it hard to get specific and detailed. 

This is where the themes come in handy to focus their thinking. 

How I run the action planning is I split the team up into groups of around 4 to 5 people and give them each 5 minutes on each theme to brainstorm 1 or 2 actions they think are critical to create their desired emotional culture.  I prompt the teams to articulate the action in as granular and specific a way as possible (think, what, when, who and why). It’s important to walk the floor, while the teams are action planning and go round each group to make sure they’re going deep. If an action is too woolly, i.e. another high level statement with no substance behind it, then ‘bad cop Lotty’ comes up (psstt bad cop Lotty isn’t too mean and scary, honest!) and I push them to drill down more. At the end of this part of the session each group shares their actions with the rest of the team / other groups. The result is there should be a list of pretty nifty actions if you’ve facilitated this well and played the ‘bad-cop’ role with right amount of balance.

6.     Vote as a team on what matter most

Now you have a list of actions it’s time for the groups to decided their top 5 or 6 critical actions. Any more than 5 or 6 can be too daunting and potentially unachievable, particularly given the many commitments people are usually juggling in the workplace. 

The approach I usually take to getting the team to agree top 5 to 6 critical actions is the same way they decided the top 5 desired and undesired feelings in the first workshop– I get them to vote. Each person has 5 votes to vote for their top 5 and when the results are in I run through them and ask if they sound right. I then (and this important) ask for volunteers to own each action, ownership and accountability is everything in this process. The team have the option at this point to choose a 6th critical action from the list if they feel there is something else burning they really need and want to do.  

7.     Brainstorm how to keep the Emotional Culture work alive and kicking

As the ECD follow up workshop draws to a close it’s useful to facilitate a quick brain storm around ideas on how to keep the ECD work alive and front of mind. Ideas for this vary and I’m actually looking to make that a topic for a future blog post so won’t go into detail here as this is already a lengthy post. What’s important is that the participants really start to think about ways they can start integrating the ECD into ‘business-as-usual’ so it continues to get focus and priority. I keep this brainstorm relatively light in comparison to the task-master I was in the action planning.  It’s a great way to wrap up the session as it brings home the importance of continuing to invest in this work to keep it alive. After this brainstorm I conclude the session by running through the next steps which are basically reiterating the actions they voted for and agreed. I also invite the team to put the actions that didn’t make the cut on their team backlog of work so they can perhaps be attended to when the prioritised critical actions are complete. This is also a good way of encouraging them to continually review the list of actions and evolve them, because - spoiler alert - the work on emotional culture is never done. As I mentioned at the start of this blog, the fire fuelling the desired emotional culture needs continued stoking and attending to.

8.     Pass over the baton to ensure ongoing ownership

Once the ECD follow up workshop is done there is a couple of things to do to pass over the baton on the ECD work (you can so tell I used to be a runner with my relay analogy). First thing is to send out the list of top 5 or 6 critical actions for their review and sign off along with the brainstormed list of ways to keep the ECD work alive.  Again don’t hang about on this – send within a couple of days of the workshop so it’s still fresh.  The second thing is to once they have signed off the critical actions populate the Emotional Culture Canvas.  This canvas is a living breathing document that can be part of the workplace visual management keeping it in plain view will help add to the accountability and importance. You can also remind them of their ideas for keeping the ECD work alive and potentially add in a few ideas of your own. One thing I do strongly suggest if that if they have any kind of team operating and planning rhythm they incorporate the actions and ECD tools into that.

Closing up

So those are my tips and ideas for running your ECD follow so you get the traction on creating positive culture change by starting to agree, plan and implement tangible actions. This is in no way the end of the journey because it’s a journey that never ends. Emotional culture is at the centre of change and change by its very nature keeps on changing, therefore the culture needs to keep evolving too. That doesn’t mean it has be hard though, as the actions start to be implemented and new ways of working embedded to keep it alive, it can become simply a part of your regular way of operating and doing things, but also and more importantly part of your way of ‘being’.

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Lotty Roberts is a forward thinker in New Zealand in the field of Change Management and Leadership, with 20 years’ experience delivering and leading others through large scale change and transformation programmes. Lotty has now founded her own consultancy business - ‘Mind U’ where she is devoted to helping companies and individuals build the culture, mindset, capability and 'know how' to mindfully lead and navigate themselves through change using her hands on experience and knowledge as a leader, mindfulness coach and change management subject matter expert. 

Do you want to learn more about The Emotional Culture Deck? There are a few ways you can you learn more about the deck:

• Visit www.theemotionalculturedeck.com
• 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 on [email protected]

#theemotionalculturedeck #proelephantrider #ridersandelephants #emotionalculture #emotionalculturedeck