Waking up daily the past three weeks to single digit temperatures has me seeing the current Polar Vortex I’m living through as a metaphor for many small business work environments.
Many suffer from their own Polar Vortex in the workplace as co-workers and business leaders freeze out each other from communicating about vital issues.
The vital issues that are typically frozen out from communication revolve around performance expectations, workplace behaviors, and accountability to performance.
Interestingly, even though these issues are not outwardly communicated they are always a factor in the background, playing on the minds of those in the workplace.
When the above issues are not communicated outwardly, or directly to those whom to hear about them, inevitably assumptions are made, gossip develops, and the grapevine starts the flow of misinformation.
In my seminars on The 7 Deadliest Sins of Leadership & Workplace Communication the issue rising to the top with every audience is what I have labeled a Lack Of Directness & Candor, which speaks to the Polar Vortex freezing out communication in the workplace.
Some of this lack of directness and candor is consciously avoided and can be labeled procrastination due to the difficultness of bringing the issue to the surface. Some just never gets identified as important enough to bring to the surface and is kept under wraps.
Both situations cause trust in workplace to erode over time often leading to toxic environments, creating a downward spiral small business leaders struggle to address, and struggle even more to turn around.
In these seriously toxic, Polar Vortex environments there is only one strategy that will work, what I call the Clean Slate Strategy.
The Clean Slate Strategy requires all parties in the work environment to offer each other a fresh start by dropping any past transgressions, misunderstandings, or resentments, etc. and begin anew.
This approach takes high levels of humility all around. It allows each party to admit they had a part in creating the present environment and made some mistakes along the way.
In launching the Clean Slate Strategy it’s best to get everyone working together to look to the future and define the characteristics of the ideal professional environment in which they would like to work.
From there, specific performance and behavior expectations will be created with each person promising to contribute to, and most importantly be held accountable to, the new workplace standards.
Most communication Polar Vortexes in small businesses relate to either past or present behaviors and performance standards being violated in the workplace that were ambiguously articulated at the beginning of the employment relationship, and poorly addressed or avoided from there.
The Clean Slate Strategy allows for a fresh start for all and can build a new, fresh work environment all can enjoy contributing to.
Are you humble enough to give it a try?
