How We Can Treat Each Other As Human Beings Instead of Doers at the Workplace

An interview with Sau-Yin Chua, Bernadette — Managing Partner of Positive Performance Consulting

My friend, Bernadette Chua , is the Managing Partner of Positive Performance Consulting Pte Ltd . I’m inspired and intrigued by?her company’s empowering vision?—?“We envision to co-create waves of successful, positive, and sustainable work cultures across the globe.”?This vision, to me, radiates the energy of gentleness.

Can you imagine how much goodness can ripple out of companies that practice gentleness around the globe?

Though ‘Gentleness’ is not a typical word used in the corporate world, Bernadette was happy to be interviewed and discuss this with me. It’s incredible to learn how Positive Performance Consulting sets about achieving its vision with plenty of compassion, mutual respect, and firm boundary-setting.

Here are the highlights of our interview that we’d love to share with you. I have edited this interview for conciseness and clarity. The questions are asked by me and answered by Bernadette.

Do you see signs of more Gentleness in the workplace?

This is an intriguing question because ‘Gentleness’ is not used in corporate speak. We don’t usually say we want to build a culture of gentleness in the workplace.

But over the years, I have been architecting a lot of change with various local and global companies. I think there’s a shift in people realizing it is no longer enough to focus purely on achieving business goals.

Corporate leaders are now continuously exploring and experimenting with new intentions:

• Building a workplace environment where their employees can thrive.
• Improving the overall well-being of the organization.
• Building a more positive workplace culture makes employees generally more positive and even inspiring to their co-workers.

The newer working generations are now more interested in seeing the person as a whole instead of just communicating about the work that needs to be done.

How does your company help other companies build more positive corporate cultures?

“We envision to co-create waves of?successful, positive, and sustainable work cultures across the globe.”

Here are the three keywords in our company vision that we share with management teams of companies who are interested in working with us.

1. Successful

There are two extremes we see in the corporate world:

1. Focusing entirely on monetizing without caring about their employees.
2. Making their employees happy but not making any profits.

Success, to us, is balancing both intentions of making healthy profits and having happy employees.

2. Positive

To have well-performing organizations, we need to build positive individuals. ‘Positive’ does not mean that you force yourself to put on a smile every day when you go to work.

We want to co-create with everyone in the company to create policies, processes, and initiatives where people feel safe to share what’s going on in their lives at the workplace.

3. Sustainable

We need processes and procedures that allow companies to achieve their desired business outcomes. We also want to create a culture where everyone can play their part.

We usually offer these two ways of helping our client companies — short-term Learning & Development workshops and longer-term projects we refer to as a Business Culture Blueprint.

A Business Culture Blueprint is like doing a Culture Renovation

A Business Culture Blueprint is similar to what Kevin Oakes described as?Culture Renovation in his book. Instead of revamping a company’s culture, we explore how we can retain what is already working well and change other specific parts. For example, maybe your company has a very loyal team of employees. Now that it’s expanding from 20 to 100 employees, we can explore how to change some processes and procedures to keep up with this expansion.

It becomes much more manageable to achieve when we simply focus on tweaking some parts.

We have observed some company leaders wanting to do a total revamp without holding gentle pulse conversations with the staff to see what’s already working well in the company. Sometimes, we see employees from the ground lamenting how when new leaders come in, the entire culture is going to shift drastically again. It is not sustainable for the company. We don’t encourage this style of drastic culture change.

How do you ensure enough buy-in and alignment before starting the project?

For sustainable long-term change, there needs to be complete alignment with the management team.

When I think of any potential harshness in my work, it would be having clients with an abrasive attitude.

Healthy skepticism, on the other hand, is more than welcome. After listening to one of my radio interviews, a client approached me, and his first sentence to me was,?“You know, I don’t believe in consultants.”?I was interested to hear his perspective, so I responded with,?“Why don’t you tell me more?”.?He turned out to be one of the best clients I’ve worked with. We worked together with his team for around nine months.

I’ve found the key factors to ensuring optimum success are:

• Having active buy-in and involvement from the management team right from the start.
• Company leaders must be role models for the changes they want to champion.
• Having a mutual understanding that long-lasting changes need some time and space to take root. Our involvement with the company can take three months to a year. But the initiatives are meant to be implemented over one to two years.
• Stop the?‘Tell People’?culture such as, “I would like you to stop being angry.” or “Can you be more productive?” It’s more effective to share specific strategies and to offer what people need to achieve these intentions.

We firmly believe most people don’t wake up each morning wanting to be mean to others, like that nasty boss or toxic colleague. When we can unwind our painful triggers over time, it’s much easier to treat others right.

Final Takeaways

Thank you, Bernadette, for sharing with me so openly how we can apply Gentleness to create an authentically positive, sustainable, and successful workplace culture.

It is crucial not to push down agendas to the consulting company or the ground staff. Intense suspicion and abrasive attitudes are other forms of harshness that deter a healthy working relationship. Co-creation, open and honest communication, compassion, patience, and a healthy curiosity for exploring new possibilities are essential to creating healthy and successful organizations.

If we are encouraged to express and nurture these healthy qualities at work, imagine the numerous benefits that will ripple out to the individuals’ families and collectively in society. This is sacred work, indeed.