Better Me + Better You = Better Us
The 5 C’s of a Conscious Company Culture: Cultivation
One of the biggest challenges facing many leaders is how to attract and retain top talent in their industry. In 2022, over 50 million employees quit their jobs. And research indicates that over a third of employees aren’t fully engaged in their work.
Culture Amp released their most recent findings about employee engagement in 2023 and shared a significant result: the number one factor most correlated with employee engagement is confidence in company leadership. “The data suggests that employees are looking for companies where they feel confident that their leaders are able to deliver both culturally and tactically. From a cultural management perspective, it is important that leaders can communicate an inspiring vision and illuminate how their people contribute to that mission.”
This finding supports the first of the 5 C’s: Cause. Staff need to feel confident in leadership’s vision for the organization and what they as a team can accomplish.
Interestingly, Culture Amp also found that, “After leadership, learning and development remains a top-line contributor to engagement across the globe, which continues the trend we have seen the last few years. The data is consistent – if you want to engage employees, create a place where they can learn and grow.”
This research emphasizes the need to focus on the fifth of the 5 C’s of a conscious culture: Cultivation. Employees value cultivation of and investment in their professional growth.
One of the best books about this topic is An Everyone Culture, by Robert Keegan and Lisa Lahey, where they share how to create a deliberately developmental organization. Keegan and Lahey conducted extensive research to demonstrate how the adult mind continues to grow and learn throughout life, not just during our time in school. In fact, they found that people’s strongest motive is to grow. And if you aren’t meeting that need, staff will leave to find places where their talent will be cultivated.
This is why they advocate for building companies that focus on the deliberate development of staff: “Deep alignment with people’s motive to grow means fashioning an organizational culture in which support to people’s ongoing development is woven into the daily fabric of working life, visible in the company’s regular operations, day-to-day routines, and conversations.”
For each of the 5 C’s, there is a question you can use to rate you and your team. For Cultivation, the question is, “Does your team have ongoing opportunities for growth?”
Rate your Cultivation on a scale of 1-10; 1 being not at all, 10 being absolutely. You can also ask team members to offer their own rating of Cultivation. If you or your team rates your level of Cultivation below a 10, you can do more to cultivate your team’s talent and meet their desire for ongoing growth.
To improve your team’s cultivation, consider the following examples:
Professional Development plans for each employee
Opportunities for growth across the organization
Earlier this year I talked to Phil Applebaum, who is the Director of Talent and Culture at the nonprofit Pacific Legal Foundation, and I asked him about how his team attracts and retains talent. He shared, “We’ve lost some great talent because we either ran out of ways to challenge them, or we simply did not have the growth opportunities to match what they were being offered elsewhere. While the latter is just a matter of business and bad luck, the former is something we’re trying to prevent.”
So Phil helped the organization purposely invest in the cultivation of their talent. Now, every staff member—whether the CEO or a new intern—sets an annual professional development goal. “One thing I implemented this year was to include a professional development goal (OKR style) on every staff member’s performance review, even senior staff. That process helped us identify some additional ways to challenge some of our top folks and find new ways for them to add value.” Phil shares this purposeful investment in growth resulted in higher employee engagement and overall satisfaction among staff.
In An Everyone Culture, the authors share the story of one company that has created a deliberately developmental organization: technology company Next Jump. The company sums up their culture in this equation: Better Me + Better You = Better Us.
Better Me “signals the importance of constant improvement” for each individual employee.
Better You “is about the meaning people derive from work through helping others, inside and outside the company.”
Better Us “is the payoff for a company, the community, and ultimately the world, built around both Better Me and Better You; it’s the outcome for everyone in the company of being more fulfilled and better off in a deeper sense.”
Next Jump is so committed to making this philosophy intrinsic in their work that “in the salary review process, contributions to revenue are weighed at 50 percent, and contributions to culture at 50 percent.”
Not only does this philosophy build a more conscious culture, it is conscious leadership in action. By investing in our own growth, and the growth and aid of those around us, we elevate the overall consciousness of our team, our company, our community, and by extension the world.
Work happy. Live happy. BE happy.
Meredith
The way we work and build teams is rapidly changing. Leaders often feel unprepared to navigate the transition. As a conscious leadership coach, consultant, and communicator, Meredith helps leaders and their teams create new ways of working and relating so they can prepare for the future by consciously co-creating it.
Contact her to develop your conscious leadership and transform your organization into the workplace of the future.
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