Have you ever taken a moment to step back and think about the kinds of conversations you’re having with people within your team?
Do you ever intentionally initiate certain kinds of conversations or do you just let things happen by chance?
One thing we have identified within businesses who successfully build strong cultures and alignment across their team is that they are very intentional about the kinds of conversations they have.
In this article, we’ll outline the three conversations you need to be having in order to bring your culture to life across your organisation and set your entire company up for success.
Conversation 1: Inspiring Conversations
Inspiring conversations are, quite literally, the ones that have an inspirational impact on the people within your organisation.
Generally, the focus of these conversations is the larger vision and purpose of the organisation. They should generally centre around:
How do we help people understand the purpose of the organisation, the life of the organisation, as well as how do we help people unlock their own purpose, a purpose within themselves?
They should walk away from these conversations feeling really passionate and inspired about what they’re doing and why they come into work every day.
The reason inspiring conversations are important is that they lift both passion and belief, which have a flow-through effect on energy levels and overall performance within a business.
Conversation 2: Alignment Conversations
The purpose of alignment conversations is to help people get to that next level of detail in terms of understanding what you need from each other and how you’re going to support each other.
Often this is where companies fall short. While they may have successfully inspired their employees, they might not have set specific expectations about how this actually translates to the day-to-day of operating within the team.
Alignment conversations are therefore an opportunity to provide clarity to your team, a level of focus and also enable team-wide cooperation.
Conversation 3: Honest Conversations
The final type of conversation that companies need to have to truly embed their culture are honest conversations. Sometimes they’re called difficult, crucial or confronting conversations, but essentially these conversations all centre around areas of conflict.
For your culture to be a point of difference and have a chance at bringing your strategy to life, you have to have a way of communicating with each other when conflict kicks in.
An honest conversation is basically an opportunity to talk through things, in situations where you have rising emotions and differing opinions.
While it’s sometimes easier in the short-term to ignore things that are bothering us, in the long-term doing so will not serve you or the organisation, so it is always best to nip problems in the bud with an honest conversation.
Ultimately, the reason why these three conversations are so key to embedding your culture is that these are the ones that are going to lift the overall level of care within the business and create a sense of psychological ‘safety’ team-wide.
In this video we deep dive into these three essential conversations for embedding culture, and why they are so fundamentally important. Take 7 minutes out of your day to tune in.