Video Series: Creating a Culture of Positive Influence

Belief

This video is about how to create a culture of shared belief around the power each employee gains from:

• Taking charge of their self-belief and their self-definitions.
• Knowing that you believe in them.
• Believing in each other.
• A shared belief in their company and their mission.

This is not about ideals, it’s about how to make it happen in real life, and how to make it a real pillar of the team culture.

Connection

Here I’ll focus on 4 ways to establish stronger connections, whether it’s between you and your team or between the team members.

• Connections that are built upon the strongest basis for lasting connections – shared purpose.
• Connections that are built through mutual respect. How respect is really created.  Earning respect vs. giving respect.
• Connections that are built through mutual understanding. What that means, how it works, and what it looks like.
• Connections that are built through selflessness. I’ll explain how selflessness is actually instilled, respected and lived out as a core value.

Trust

This video describes 4 ways to build a culture of mutual trust.

• Follow through – an often-underrated factor in trust.
• Consistency – another often-overlooked trust factor.
• Truthfulness – telling the truth that needs to be told when it needs to be told. This includes how to engage effectively and productively in the kinds of conversations people need to have but often want to avoid, and how to do it in a way that leaves everyone better off at the end of the conversation than they were at the beginning.
• Advocacy – what it means to have an advocate; what it means to be an advocate; the role that advocacy plays in a culture of trust.

High Standards

Here I focus on 6 elements of high standards – how to instill them, enforce them, and maintain them. The 6 elements are:

• Performance – how to provide the kind of positive influence that strengthens commitment to higher standards of performance.
• Initiative – how to empower people to become more self-sufficient.
• Improving, and helping others to improve – how to turn that from a wish into a standard.
• Integrity – how to create a culture of zero tolerance for dishonesty.
• Communication – what to communicate for a culture of positive influence, why to communicate it, and how to communicate it.
• Resolution – how to inspire a resolution-focused temperament in the people you lead.

Encouragement and Accountability in Balance

This session is a particular favorite of mine. I believe that providing the right balance of encouragement and accountability in the right way is the single most important action item for bringing out the best in the people you lead, and also for being the kind of leader that people want to follow.

In this video I explain how to give encouragement in the literal sense of giving courage. The right kind of encouragement is huge for positive influence, so the goal of this session is to empower leaders not only to give encouragement, but literally to create a culture of encouragement. Encouraging each other becomes one of the team standards. Everyone wants to give courage to the other members of the team, and receive it from them as well. So I’ll talk about what that looks like and how it happens.

And then it’s the same with accountability. I talk about how to empower people to feel comfortable holding each other accountable. I explain why employees would actually rather be held accountable than not be held accountable, and why they expect their leader to hold them accountable.

I describe how to hold employees accountable by managing commitments instead of people. I also describe the most effective ways to address an employee’s need to improve when they’re not meeting the standard.

Energy

This session is about leading everyone on your team to be intentional about providing positive energy to the rest of the team.

I explain how leaders set the tone for a culture of positive energy in ways that the rest of the team wants to emulate. I also explain how to be intentional about conquering the enemies of energy – the forces that deplete it – and how to keep those energy depleters out while you keep the energy sources in. The enemies of energy that I specifically address are:

• Fear
• Worry
• Fatigue
• Negative thinking

Perspective

The final session is about one of the most exciting ways you can have life-changing influence on the people you lead – giving them a different way of seeing things – a fresh perspective. I talk about giving new perspective in general, and then I zero in on some of the ways great mentors are most frequently confronted with the need to provide different perspectives:

• Fear
• Mental clutter
• Unfairness
• Challenges
• Disappointment
• Patience
• Negativity
• Change
• Self-doubt
• Focusing on what we can control instead of what we can’t