MaryAnn Means-Dufrene and Faith Geiger
The way a company functions is just as important as the product it puts out — that’s the focus of Collective Growth, a coaching and advising group whose business is to help companies organize internal processes, better employee relationships, and elevate overall performance.
The group’s clientele has included names like NBC 5-Telemundo 39 and M2G Ventures, but here, the women who run Collective Growth — partners and self-dubbed “human potentialists” Faith Geiger and MaryAnn Means-Dufrene, and director of brand experience Betsy Beaman — are giving some free advice on ways companies can improve the dynamic among their employees.
Here are their basic tips on how to improve company culture.
1. Cultivate greater self-awareness. Improving company culture means turning inward and examining how your attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and biases shape the environment and employee experience.
2. Improve the lives of everyone in your stakeholder ecosystem, and your culture will improve. The world is changing at a rapid pace — make sure your culture is evolving to meet the demands of the future, or even better, set a new standard of a healthy workplace culture.
3. Allow people to bring their whole self to work. The more people can become the highest and best version of themselves personally and professionally, the more your culture and business will improve.
4. Create “care instructions” for your workplace culture, like those found on the tag of a garment, with specific actions, practices, and habits that help maintain a conscious culture.
5. See culture through a new lens. Culture is not the “what”; it is the “how.” Culture is shaped by attitudes, beliefs, normed behaviors, workplace policies and practices, and more. It’s more nuanced than a mission statement — culture is embodied.
6. Improving culture means asking yourself (and then taking thoughtful action), “What is growing inside of my workplace?” Love or fear? Empowerment or control? Mediocrity or greatness?
7. Culture is energy. Think about the energy you and your team bring into the workplace and how it impacts well-being and performance. If we shift the energy, we shift the environment.
8. Be inspired by the fact that improving company culture improves interpersonal relationships, communication, and the systems people work within. It is a globally beneficial effort that reaps long-term rewards.
9. Culture can be a dynamic force that helps humans flourish, or it can destroy. Remind yourself and your team that growth is dynamic, not linear, and includes stumbles and setbacks. The magic is in how we recover and grow from our experience.