4-Step Process for Getting On Mission Together
Previous: 5 Keys to building a thriving culture
Building a thriving culture begins with getting a group of people — your people — on mission together. Accomplishing this task will not require a cape or mask.
You don’t have to be a superhero. You do have to be a leader.
You’ll need to lead with a fierce will for your mission, high social/emotional intelligence, and a healthy measure of humility. Leaders with these characteristics are ready to listen, desire collaboration, grow relationships, and inspire greatness.
Step 1: Honor the past.
Everyone on your team has a history — full of wins and struggles, joy and pain. Getting that history on the table — inviting folks to acknowledge their past experiences, and articulate their expectations — is an important start to getting on mission together.
Step 2: Blaze a Clear Path
Blazing a clear path helps you shift your team from the past to the present. Getting folks on mission together requires shared expectations. You’ll need to establish a shared vision for working together. In that process, it will serve you well to encourage dialogue and surface implicit expectations — yours and the team’s.
Step 3: Translate Values into Behaviors
Once you’ve identified and gotten crystal clear about your organizational values, you’ll need to bring them to life. To animate your organizational values, work as a team to choose the behaviors and practices you want to see in your workplace. Getting your folks on mission together is much easier when workflow expectations are explicit and intentionally woven into your organization’s processes and protocols.
Step 4: Raise Your Banner
Finally, you’ll want to help your team make explicit connections between the why and how within your workplace. Getting folks on mission together means offering meaningful work and providing meaningful space to accomplish that work. With a clear sense of why and how, your team will carry the right practices forward — strengthening your cultural ethos.
In thriving workplace cultures, teams are on mission together.
How’s your team? If you’re not there yet, that’s okay. Take a step forward, starting today.
Next: 4 Winning Strategies for Staying Clear from the Top
Originally published at https://www.armarshall.com on June 4, 2020.
