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Spirit Week…Every Week!

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I read an article this week…from one of my internet Google Alerts.  It was one of those articles that struck me – instantly.  It was by Kim Smith and it was titled Sometimes we could all use a little spirit week.  Kim shared her findings from asking her daughter about her favourite part of spirit week.  You know what that is if you have children.  If you don’t have children, spriit week is a time (a week, actually) when schools engage in activities to infuse energy into the classroon…with friendly competition between classrooms and amongst the student-body as a whole.  Even my son, in middle school, has been heavily involved in collecting pennies ’so we can be the best classroom in the school!’

Kim’s daughter replied that the best part of spirit week was that all of the social rules disappeared and everyone was equal and everyone was focused on having fun.  ‘It doesn’t matter if I am in the band or I am a jock”, she said.  ‘Nobody cares about my clothes or anything.”  Kim’s daughter related that spirit week was about the team…doing what was best for the whole, and not worrying about individual, petty, differences.

I thought about that…and how true that was relative to my own children’s experience of spirit week.  Everyone is smiling, everyone is engaged, and everyone works together!  No one is left out and no ‘normal’ classes (the ‘populars’, the ‘nerds’, the ‘jocks’, etc.) exist.  We are just here, together, working together to achieve a common goal.  Not a bad formula for success in any organization, I think!!

While thinking about writing this post, my daughter came home from school (her first year in a new high school) and said ’Mom, I am so proud of myself!  I said “hi” to some people I don’t know really well … and they said “hi” back.  It was cool!’

So … next week, after you return from a weekend of thanksgiving celebrations with family, think about what you can do to make every week ’spirit week’ at your workplace.  Really…it doesn’t take much!  A smile, a ‘great to see you’, an engaged look in the eye…that’s it! 

Let me know how it goes…and I’ll do the same!

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Appreciative Inquiry “at Work”

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

If you have not already heard of Appreciative Inquiry, check out AI Commons and learn a bit about AI and it’s founder David Cooperrider.  I first became acquainted with AI from a colleague; that inspired me to attend the AI Conference in Orlando Florida in 2008.  Since then, I use the principles of AI regularly in the work I do with organizations.  This summer, I took extensive training with Jane Magruder Watkins and Maureen McKenna on using the theory of AI in practice.

Here’s a quick peek at the principles of AI:

  • organizations (and the humans within) grow in the direction of their most frequent inquiries; when we appreciate what is best about ourselves and each other, and ask questions about that, we get more of what’s best
  • we learn about and create more success by asking ‘what is the root cause of success?’  (as opposed to creating more failure by asking ‘what is the root cause of our failure?’
  • we get higher performance by focusing on our strengths, rather than ‘fixing’ our weaknesses (inquiring about weaknesses begets more weaknesses)
  • our inquiries are fateful…the questions we ask set the stage for what we find; instead of asking ‘what is stopping us from being successful?, we need to ask ‘what is contributing to our success?’
  • our perceptions determine reality (not the other way around)
  • we socially contruct our organizations (and families, and world); our interactions are the source for what is true for us; so AI requires that the entire system (organization, family) participate in the process
  • we create what we imagine…we will notice what we anticipate, positive or negative, so anticipating a positive image of ourselves, each other, and our organizations, helps us to create that reality
  • the phases of AI are Discovery (inquiring about what’s right, what our strengths are, what is occurring when we are at our best); Dream (imagining our organization as we desire it in the future); Design (identifying the elements that will construct the dream organization); and Destiny (realizing our destiny, as we have constructed it)

There is much evidence that what we think about affects our actions which in turn determine our reality.  Most of us would agree with this idea.  Now we have the practice of Appreciative Inquiry which provides us with a process that works!

 

 

 

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How Positive Psychology can Work at Work

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Check out Martin Seligman talking about Positive Psychology on Ted.com.  I had the privilege to see Dr. Seligman speak at an Appreciative Inquiry conference last year and I was impressed with his ability to simplify what could otherwise be a complicated subject.  I believe we have enormous opportunities to integrate the results of his research into today’s workplace; impacting productivity as well as global happiness!

We commonly speak in workplaces about the challenges of increasing employee engagement.  What we are missing often are the two keys Dr. Seligman cited – being able to use our strengths more at work (and – most importantly – being able to adapt the way we do our work to capitalize on our strengths), and being connected to a meaning higher than ourselves. 

With the first, we can be more creative at designing jobs for people instead of making people fit jobs as we have designed them (refit jobs to people, not people to jobs).  With the second, we can talk more about purpose at work every day; ask ‘why’ regularly (Why are you in your organization?  What purpose do you serve?).

What do you think? 

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