Leading Workplace Change™

There has been a growing amount of focus recently on how people can stay healthy - looking at what we eat; how we exercise; and, how we manage stress - asking us to take more personal responsibility for our own health.  During my last annual medical check-up, I started to think more about the role of doctors in helping people to stay healthy.  What expectations should my doctor have of me and what should I have from her?

My next thought was - are doctors trained to help people stay healthy to prevent sickness or is the profession’s focus on identifying and treating disease?  It seems that the focus should be on prevention, but my sense is that the historical training for doctors is more reactive in nature.  So if people are becoming more proactive in thinking about their health rather than waiting for disease to strike, then we need to have doctors trained and rewarded to help us stay healthy as well as treat disease.  This would be a major culture shift for the profession from a focus on disease to health.

Now we can go back to the question of expectations between doctors and their patients, but wait a minute - first I need to think about language.  A patient is defined as - one under medical treatment and when I go in for my annual check-up, I am really a client looking for a health service provider. Let me know if I am sick, but please give me the info I need to stay healthy!

Again, the first step of acting differently is to think differently.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Personal-Ah-Hah Moments by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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As soon as I wrote my last post about the workplace culture of a presidential campaign staff, a friend referred me to Tom Dickinson’s 7/10/08 post in Rollingstone.com called “Obama’s Brain Trust”.  This post explores the ins and outs of Barack Obama’s campaign staff.  Upon reading, it reminded me of a few ah hah’s about how a workplace culture can make or break a leader’s legacy.

Leaders are the primary creators of a culture for their organization – some do it unwittingly, by just acting the way they do.  Others are very mindful and clearly articulate their personal beliefs and model their expectations about how people should act in the organizations they lead.  It appears that Obama’s approach is one of mindfulness as seen in the following quote from Dickinson’s post.

“When I (Obama) started this campaign, “I wasn’t sure that I was going to be the best of candidates. But what I was absolutely positive of was that there was the possibility of creating the best organization. The way great things happen is when people are willing to submerge their own egos and focus on a common task. That’s my old organizing mind-set. It’s not just a gimmick, it’s not just a shtick. I actually believe in it.”  

You can see from this quote that Obama is talking about his expectations about how people should act and he tells them why - based upon past experiences that proved successful and personal beliefs.  What also struck me while reading the post was how mindfully Obama models how he wants others to act in his organization as seen by this quote from one of Obama’s staffers.

“When he (Obama) is running a meeting, he does more listening than talking, asking questions and taking the temperature of everyone in the room. Regardless of wherever you fall in the hierarchy, he listens to you as though you are the campaign manager. He focuses, he prods, he pushes, to make sure that he fully understands your position. That sets an important tone as well: When you go into a meeting expecting to learn and not dictate, it fosters camaraderie.”

Mindfully setting the tone is a primary role for leaders – most focus on the behaviors that enable strategies and for Obama this includes how his campaign team works together to execute.  It is a balanced internal and external focus and usually the make or break practice that allows leaders to create legacies and presidential candidates create political machines.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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