Have you ever felt like you work in a parallel universe? Perhaps you walk into the office and immediately feel like you have stepped into a poorly scripted episode of the Twilight Zone, where there seems to be an alternate reality in which passive-aggressiveness reigns and accountability is nonexistent. If your office refrigerator is littered with handwritten signs and your company’s values are more often discussed than put into action, your company has an organizational honesty problem.
People lie. It’s part of being human. We lie for many different reasons, but most often we lie to avoid conflict. It’s why kids blame an accident on the dog. It’s why we ignore the guy talking loudly into his phone in the elevator. It’s why we tell the waiter the food is good when it’s average. When lies creep into an organization’s culture, however, it creates an alternate reality that chips away at its effectiveness. In order to maintain harmony, we deceive ourselves and submit to groupthink. Deep organizational secrets are developed that no one talks about, but everyone does a lot of qualifying, over-explaining and over-justifying to get by. Because of this, companies miss vital connections, protect poor performers and excuse bad behavior.
It does not need to be this way. At JMReid Group, we partner with our clients to run Liberating Structure sessions. Liberating structures create a construct for organizations to address the issue by allowing us to have uncomfortable, but productive conversations in a short time. These methods function to break the façade you carry around with you so that you are free to engage with reality.Read about how facilitation skills need to change
Engaging both hemispheres of your brain, we use our understanding of neuroscience and philosophies of the mind to spark conversation. These discussions help participants recognize the trouble with the groupthink in their company and how to overcome those challenges. We show you how to create new conversations in your organization with a language that is accessible and liberating to your team. Positioning curiosity as the leading direction, our facilitators push participants to understand how their value and values exist within the company and how the company’s goals could be better served with clear and honest communication.
If you feel as though your team is just going through the motions or neglecting the obvious disconnect between company values and actual performance, the culture of your company may not be serving you well. Peter Block said that “we change culture by changing the nature of conversation.” Liberating structures allow you and your company to do that by breaking the monotony of groupthink and freeing up your people to be their best.Learn more about Liberating Structures