Monday Motivation & How to Effectively Drive Cultural Change

THINKING YELLOW

Yellow is creative from a mental aspect, the colour of new ideas, helps us to find new ways of doing things. It is the practical thinker, not the dreamer. It is the best colour to create enthusiasm for life and can awaken greater confidence and optimism.

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"Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays." Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's Monday, time to get cracking.

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THE STONECUTTERS BLOCK

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 100 & First blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” Jacob Riis

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"Change isn’t like surgery. Even when you change, the old beliefs aren’t just removed like a worn out hip and replaced. Instead, the new beliefs take their place alongside the old ones, and they become stronger, they give you a different way to think, feel and act." Carol Dweck, Mindset

Culture is like the wind. It is invisible, yet its effect can be seen and felt. When it is blowing in your direction it makes for smooth sailing. When it is blowing against you, everything is more difficult. For organisations seeking to become more adaptive and innovative, culture change is often the most challenging part of the transformation. But culture change can’t be achieved through top-down mandate. It lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of “how things are done around here."

It’s important to start with actions, not new mission statements or company structures, because culture change only happens when people take action. Show people the change you want to see. 

Here are a few tips for driving cultural change:

1. Frame the change - Creating a sense of urgency is helpful, but can be short-lived. To harness people’s full, lasting commitment, they must feel a deep desire, and even responsibility, to change
2. Demonstrate the wins - Leaders too often fall into the trap of declaring the culture shifts they hope to see. Instead, they need to spotlight examples of actions they hope to see more of within the culture
3. Harness networks - Building coalitions, bridging disparate groups to form a larger and more diverse network that shares a common purpose
4. Create safehavens - If your hope is for individuals to act differently, it helps to change their surrounding conditions to be more supportive of the new behaviours

*source, Harvard Business Review

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QUESTION TIME

Questioning techniques are important because they can stimulate learning, develop the potential to think, drive to clear ideas, stir the imagination, and incentive to act.

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1. There is usually a block of time each day when you are at your best— peak energy, peak enthusiasm. Let's say it's 2 hours per day. How do you spend those 2 hours? Who or what gets your best time?