Culture Building Part 3- The Green Shoots of Renewal

When we talk about the solution, and only the solution, we imagine a culture in which our work has meaning, and our contribution is valued. We emphasise the importance of dialogue and consultation and imagine ourselves as a community in which our relationships are productive and collaborative and the conversations we have are positive and respectful.

No amount of management system will give you this.

BS ISO 45001:2018 outlines the requirements of a management system for occupational safety and health. Its stated objectives are to help an organisation manage health and safety risks, improve its health and safety performance and fulfil its legal obligations. Top management is required to develop a culture that supports these intended outcomes, but interestingly such a culture is not itself an intended outcome of the system.

The culture you want will not be provided by improving your management system, by extending its reach or making it more robust. If you want to improve your culture, an entirely different approach is required. If you want to improve your culture, you have to build it, not from scratch but upon the foundations of what is good already, what is working.

By asking the Miracle Question we learn what good looks like in whatever context we choose to apply the question. And as it turns out, what good looks like is often very similar from one person to the next which means that achieving a consensus that everyone feels they have contributed to and can feel invested in, is a reasonable expectation.

But that is only the beginning.

When everyone knows what good looks like, the chance that we can recognise examples of ‘good’ however small and have already experienced it however fleetingly, are significantly increased because the fact is, rarely are all things always all bad.

Q. “When or where are these things that you describe even a little bit present already?” 

A. “Well my team is hardly ever like that … I’ve never really been able to get them engaged like that at all. But Paddy’s team … I’ve noticed they are more energised and proactive, some of the time at least. I don’t know how he does it!”

In the solution-building world, Paddy’s team being more energised and proactive, even for short periods of time, is a dormant resource, an indication that we already have the culture we want, but it is not present enough, often enough for it to be defining. Dormant resources are the green shoots of renewal, the foundations upon which the ultimate goal, our improved culture, is built.

Building a better culture is an incremental process of small steps forward, each step being the realisation of a small goal.

My young son saw Tom Daley diving at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and in that moment his dream of being an Olympic diver was born. Just this last weekend he competed in his first diving tournament and mum and I were delighted, firstly that he enjoyed the experience so much, but also that he achieved a very credible 18th position in a field of 25 divers. He has his sights set on a top 10 finish next time out but much as we admire his courage and determination, the simple fact is he will not score higher until he learns to point his toes. Right now, developing muscle memory through constant repetitive diving, one dive after another, until he no longer has to consciously think about his ‘lazy’ toes is the priority, alongside other such similar tiny goals all of which will accumulate and combine over the coming years to make a world class diver and ultimately … Olympic Gold.

In the solution-building approach, we have a very limited sense of what we are trying to achieve. Ultimately the goal is a better culture, but having a better culture is dependent on achieving many much smaller goals.

Right now, in our example, what is standing between us and the culture we want, is not the fact that our team is not as engaged and energised as Paddy’s team sometimes is, but the fact that we do not know how Paddy does it … but we can find out.

Q. “What’s going on here that allows this to exist, when it does? What are the conditions that have allowed this to take root?”

A. “The team has defined its purpose very clearly and each member of the team has a clear job role that is aligned to the team’s purpose.”

Q. “What else?”

A. “Paddy ensures that the members of the team have the resources to fulfil their role and he continually reviews their performance with reference to the team’s objectives.”

Q. “What else?”

A. “Paddy provides the support they need and he trusts them implicitly. He doesn’t micro-manage, he leaves them to get on with it. He trusts them to let him know when something significant changes and when it does, they stop and the whole team considers the implications.”

Learning what Paddy has done to allow the culture that we want to exist, allows us then to consider what we need to do to have the same for ourselves.

Q. “What do we have to do to get this for ourselves?”

This is Culture Building. We are not problem solving. We are not pre-occupied dissecting our own team, troubling ourselves with all that is currently wrong. We have found an example of what we agree we want, and we are exploring what it is that allows it to exist so that we can take steps to have it also.

But it does not end with Paddy’s team. By asking the Miracle Question, we learn what good looks like. And from our shared understanding of what good looks like, we can build a detailed picture, a Culture Statement, comprising all the characteristics of the culture we want. And for each characteristic we can explore where and when and in what circumstances, these things already exist, even for a short time, even a little bit, and we can discover what allows them to exist and what is needed to help them take root and flourish elsewhere.

And by doing these things, we can breathe life into our green shoots so that gradually, they extend further throughout the organisation and gradually, the culture we want is build.

Michael Emery, CMIOSH

Michael Emery is owner and director of Securus Health & Safety Limited, a Lancashire-based consultancy. He has managed health and safety for several leading organisations, household names at home and abroad, and he has been freelance since 2009. As a qualified Executive Coach accredited with the Academy of Executive Coaching in London, Michael has been helping organisations large and small develop their coaching capacity for several years. What these organisations appreciate, is that the way people communicate with each other determines, to a large degree, the kind of culture the organisation has, and engaging positively and collaboratively as coaches do, is important in shaping the kind of culture they aspire to have.