S03E13 The Story I'm Telling Myself Episode
March 27, 2024
Theresa Destrebecq & Vincent Musolino
Season 3
Episode 13
Check-In:
- Which projects give you energy?
Big Ideas:
- 3 skills that lead to successful groups: building safety, sharing vulnerability, establishing purpose
- cohesive groups - telling stories and reminding one another what they stand for
- murmuration - how birds move together
- using small signals to link the present moment to the future ideal
- organizations that don't have a purpose, mission, vision, etc.
- the challenge of extracting a purpose
- how to detect weak signals and act on them
- going through the motions of purpose - some people feel it's not worthwhile
- "What's the purpose of having a purpose?"
- Purpose is a higher order construct - something you can build everything else around
- If there are no words, there's no knowledge
- Purpose seems too impractical - not actionable, practical enough
- Cultural differences in focusing on culture
- A tool without a purpose is just an object.
- Leadership without purpose doesn't serve anyone
- You can pivot around a purpose, and shift your business structure
- Don't sell change
- When companies focus their purpose around a story or stories, it can motivate employees in a new way
- Having a clear beacon of purpose
- What can organizations do to re-engage employees? Is story enough?
- Belief that narratives only apply to children and politicians
- Stories are a way to make groups work together - story-telling goes back thousands of years
- Any good story has conflict and strong emotion -- some organizations still try to separate emotions from work
- How to help people identify the stories that they are telling themselves?
- Once you identify the story, you can change the story
- How stories drive our emotional world.
- Our brains want to close the loop, so we make up the rest of the story so we can move on - a necessary evolutionary device
- Being in the matrix and not knowing you are in the matrix
- Leading for Proficiency (being the lighthouse) - establishing priorities and connected behaviors
- Leading for Creativity (being the ship's engineer, not the captain) - safe flat, high-candor environment, not about how to
- What's your leadership purpose?
- Transactional versus transformational leadership
- The leader's job isn't to motivate others, but to create conditions for people to be motivated
Resources:
- The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle
- Start with Why Simon Sinek
- Find Your Why, Simon Sinek
- Adam Grant
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