Public practice your habit to change a culture


This post is about leading by example and announcing your behavior and practices, including things that are second nature to you.  You do this to help your team culture and behavior.

A couple months ago I took on a new role at Brainshark and I am having a great time working with the team!  Like many, many organizations that I’ve seen or heard of there are habits that become part of the culture. Some of the bad habits become blockers to growth and maturity of an organization.

A simple example of these habits is turning on your video while on a conference call.  If you want everyone to turn their video and be fully present during calls, you must start by making sure you are turning on yours every time.  Sounds simple, right? Well it isn’t.  You must always practice these small behaviors even if they feel as awkward as being the only person with their camera on. You need to make sure technical difficulties don’t happen.  It will take time but if you remain persistent you will start noticing more people following your lead. The next step is to call it out - call out when you are practicing the behavior or when others aren’t. For example,  “Oh sorry, let me turn on my camera”  or “Hey Sam, you don’t have your camera on”.  You should also notice that others will start calling each other out.

It takes a little time but you will be able to reverse the world.  It will be awkward not to have the camera on. You just have to remember that what might be second nature to you isn’t for everyone else and, sometimes, you need to lead by example.

Some changes are much more complex.   Running effective meetings and Having hard conversations are a couple common examples.  You could easily see in the meetings example how challenging this is.  Look at these meeting criteria

  1. Structured meeting with an agenda vs a brainstorming session
  2. Planning meeting vs “come to Jesus” meeting
  3. And more

Camera on/off is easy but saying every meeting must have an agenda, note taker,.... limits creativity and innovation at a company.

Running good meetings where everyone is engaged, going into a meeting and setting a good example of a participant, giving feedback to others about running or participating in meetings.  All of these must be done in parallel, and you will experience setbacks where you will get back into old bad habits.  Just hit the reset button and call out your screw up publicly just so everyone knows that you didn’t give up, use that bad meeting as an example of how you shouldn’t run meetings. One of my favorite statements in a meeting “wait wait wait, I’ve been sucking at this, Bob is on the phone and hasn’t said a word in the past 30 minutes.  Bob, the floor is yours”.  Bob could possibly take you back to the first 5 minutes of the meeting and that is a cost you should be willing to pay.

It is essential to practice good behavior to improve your culture.  Equally important is to stop your culture from drifting into the bad behaviors.  Although I used a lot of “I, you, your” it is more about the team.  It does start with us as individuals but it will end when the majority is on-board and heading in the same direction, hopefully the right one.

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