How would you describe your organization’s mood?
Walk into any organization and within 5-10 minutes you will detect its mood, which comes from the human beings that work there. Does your organization live in a mood of:
- Resignation?
- Fear?
- Ambition?
- Hospitality?
- Caring?
- Respectful?
- Determination?
Moods and emotions can limit or increase what we can achieve, what is possible. You can spend hours laying out strategic directions for your organization, but if you don’t consciously manage the mood of your organization, it will all be for naught.
So, let me say this with emphasis: Managing the mood of your organization is a powerful tool, an organizational mindful practice, to achieve your collective purpose.
In the book Reinventing Organizations, the author Frederic Laloux, makes this case. Laloux states “we need to invent practices that evoke the mood” that will best serve the organization to achieve its purpose. How do we nurture mood in the workplace? Here are examples from two organizations in his book.
- At FAVI, a metal manufacturing of 500 employees in France, “every meeting in the company started with a round where each person in turn shared a brief story of someone they had recently thanked or congratulated. The practice had a beautiful effect on the meeting: it created a mood of possibility, gratitude, celebration, and trust in other people’s goodness and talents.”
It served to shift from people’s self-centered goals to the broader needs of the organization i.e., its purpose.
- At BerylHealth, a Texas-based company that provides call center and other services to hospitals, has a practice called “Good Stuff Friday.” “A mass email chain erupts at some point on Friday afternoon. One colleague sends an email to the entire workforce recognizing and thanking a colleague or another department for something that happened that week. The first email invariably triggers a whole avalanche for thanking and recognition. The practice builds community and closes the week in a spirit of appreciation and gratitude.”
(Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness 2014)
A mindful organization gives time to nurture and manage the mood of its workplace because it has a direct impact on achieving its purpose.
What is the mood in your organization? Does the mood create energy that serves to achieve your purpose? Let me know or share your story if your organization manages its mood, and how it manages the mood.