Have you ever paused to consider where the ‘tone’ of an organisation or team comes from?
One way of thinking about the emotional tone is to consider it as part of the culture. Organisations and teams are made up of people, and people have feelings, and feelings drive behaviours; and so it is very important to be aware of whether the residents of any particular corporate village are fearful, or happy, or sad, or energised. I would suggest that the single largest resonant emotional frequency is broadcast from the leader. They transmit the strongest signal, and if that signal is suspicion, the villagers will tend to be suspicious of the leader and of each other. If the signal is anger, the villagers will tend to be fearful and/or angry. Leaders, by their way of being, define so much. They can define the moral high ground, or even if there is going to be a moral high ground.

I was intrigued by a recent article by Dina Medland entitled, ‘The Dangers Of “Window Dressing” when Raising The Bar On Corporate Ethics’.

Consider this quote from the article, ‘ nearly half of employees (45%) are not willing to raise their concerns about misconduct. Among those who have ‘spoken out,’ the proportion who say that they were not satisfied with the outcome has doubled’.

Even if those figures do not reflect all organisations, it still makes for pretty shocking reading. I would suggest that some of these organisations are in an emotional abyss, and that that abyss is essentially a giant sink hole upon which the moral high ground once lay.

This brings me to one of the key components of what I consider braver leadership to be about. As I have already suggested, the leader sets the tone. So who must be setting the tone in these organisations and teams, where results come before ethical behaviour and where almost half of a workforce won’t speak out? Ethics doesn’t belong simply in a committee, or in a ‘hand book’, it belongs in every conversation and decision. And the braver leader may go beyond the ‘hand book’ anyway, realising that a simple tick box exercise often isn’t enough for the situation at hand.

Naturally, there is no one answer as to how this might be achieved, and there is much work to be done in various different ways to help evolve corporate thinking. However, one of the ways to perhaps begin this journey is to consider the mindset of the leader. There is a link below to a new video where I consider some fundamental approaches that a leader may take in order to help set the correct emotional tone.

Best wishes
Mike

Video: https://vimeo.com/146151116

Dina Medland’s full article:

http://onforb.es/1kNfGFa