Creating an Energizing Team Culture

Clarity, positivity and empowerment

This week’s lecture covered the topic of design in complex environments, with the example of the health care system. Our project targeting the pollution of the oceans through plastic was in many aspects quite different to projects in the health sector, but the process Sam Barber introduced for successfully creating an energizing culture in a private hospital can be translated to the process we went through:

1. Create clarity on the vision by facilitating communication with all stakeholders by establishing a vision that interconnects with the corporate mission and values

2. Engage employees collaboratively throughout the transformation journey by facilitating co-creation and empowering the people to find solutions themselves

3. Explicitly identify the underlying mindset by describing all expectations in words that everyone understands

4. Maintain energy for change and involvement through empowerments, positive experiences and fun

Our team pictures when reaching milestones in our process

Throughout the whole process, our team had a very energizing spirit, and when Sam introduced her success process, I realised that we applied her steps as well:

1. Create clarity on the vision We tried to develop a vison, which we called our purpose, by including every team member, asking about their own motivation and emotional attachment to the topic. Like this, we all pushed the project in the same direction and we all felt included since the beginning. In our first session, I facilitated that every person got to share their motivation. There, I especially realised how much people appreciated to get a voice and their concern to be considered. We referred to the established purpose again and again throughout the project.

2. Engage all team members Everyone was involved in the discussions that led to a collective decision making, so there was always a collective responsibility for the outcomes. We never discussed how to make decisions, as for everyone it was obvious we would take them collectively. However, we split up tasks from the very beginning, by that empowering every team member to contribute to the outcome actively and to be considered the expert in one field. This worked very well, because it made the process more efficient, but the precondition was that the vision and thereby direction were clear to everyone and we were all open to feedback from the others to improve the work we did individually.

3. Explicitly identify the underlying mindset In one session we worked on the explicit description of the brand promises as the underlying mindset of our project in order to clarify it to everyone. The conversation about the words we chose to describe the performance, aesthetic and experience promise we want to create with the project helped a lot to make everyone feel connected to the idea and delivering tasks we split up in a similar way. Here I noticed that I struggled with some expressions that were unfamiliar to me. Discussing them in detail and visualising them by finding examples helped me to understand the underlying intention. So, this step is vital in particular when people of different cultural backgrounds and languages come together. Also, within one cultural group different personality traits and experiences might require to clarify the intentions with different methods of expression.

4. Maintain energy We created positive experiences and fun in our team, by meeting in various locations, bringing sweets to share in the team meetings and taking funny pictures with all our major milestones. The pictures supported positive energy and a sense of belonging to the group, made us smile, especially when looking at the pictures again after the meeting. I realised later that I showed the pictures also to my family and friends and received compliments for the fun group I was part of and the hard work we were doing. This made me proud of the project and increased emotional attachment to the work we were doing.