Mike Clark's Business Bites: Time for workplace culture health check

Seagull managers swoop in when you make a mistake, poop on you and then leave. No prizes for guessing that is not healthy. Photo / Unsplash

Is your culture healthy? And how do you measure it? Would all your team agree with your perception of your workplace culture?

One of my favourite expressions is, "you get more of what you focus on so focus on what you want more of". Workplaces provide fertile ground to witness the truth of this principle.

A quick few questions before we delve a little deeper. What do you look for in your team? Is your culture wired to fault find and focus on what is wrong or to focus on what is right?

The human brain has one primary function - to keep you alive. The very structure of your brain reinforces this with a small, walnut-sized part of your brain, the basal ganglia (often referred to as your reptilian brain), responsible for our innate and automatic self-preserving behaviour (think your flight, fight and freeze modes), which ensure our survival and that of our species.

Beyond this the human brain is incredibly malleable. It is possible to programme it much like a computer. Propaganda plays on this - give a message enough noise and consistency and you can shape the ideologies of a nation. What programming do you allow in your workplace? Both at the individual level and the team level?

If you spilt a cup of coffee over your desk would you simply wipe it up or would you start a personal tirade: "Trust me to be such a dumb klutz! I always doing stupid things like this! Here's the start of another bumbling day!"

Such outbursts reveal deep insecurities in individuals and give the message that mistakes are unacceptable. This is then amplified on a team level where the managers tend to only give feedback when things go wrong. Older generations often grew up in workplaces where "no news is good news". If you got paid you were doing okay. If the boss approached you then you knew you had messed up. I call this "seagull management" - they swoop in, poop on you and then leave! No prizes for guessing that is not healthy.

Watch yourself and your team this coming week. Do you tend to catch people doing things right? Are you generous (and authentic) with praise? Is it safe to fail because your culture sees "failure" as a learning experience? Does your written communication focus on what people should do (as against stop this/don't do that/etc)?

When we look for the best in people we tend to find it. Keep a tally of what you see and hear this week and it will give a great indicator of the areas that need some work.

• Mike Clark is director and lead trainer and facilitator at Think Right business training company.