Exercise - Creating an Empowered and Optimistic Culture

Before we start, it is important to understand a bit of background.

1. Optimism is about how we describe events – to ourselves and others. Things that have happened in the past or are likely to happen in the future. This is called our "explanatory style".
2. Moods are contagious. Optimism, cynicism, pessimism, empowerment can each become the dominant culture of a team and influence the way a team interprets its situation and the way it responds.
3. Team cultures (and explanatory styles) can be influenced by events. If a lot of bad things happen it is easy to slip into pessimism. Or “learned helplessness”, which afflicts a lot of large organizations. On the other hand, a run of successes can build a team’s confidence.
4. Team cultures can also be changed by conscious intervention – which is what we are going to do.
5. Team cultures of optimism and empowerment produce better team results and more fulfilled team members. “Tempered optimism” is best of all, where a team’s enthusiastic optimism is tempered by an accurate understanding of any risks or downsides.

Right. Enough of the theory, let’s get to the exercise to create a more optimistic and empowered team or leadership style.

The exercise

This exercise focuses on teams, but you can easily modify it to use as an individual.

1. As a team, have a look at the disempowering thoughts and beliefs exercise.
2. Discuss it for 15 minutes in a team meeting, seeing if you can identify a time recently when the team showed any disempowered thoughts or beliefs.
3. Remember when you are doing this to approach this as a constructive team problem-solving session. We are not seeking to blame people, but to improve the collective culture.
4. If you can find a topic or decision that you approached in an unnecessarily pessimistic or disempowered way, try to work out why. What you will usually find is that the discussion contained assumptions – stated or unstated – that might be inaccurate. Like “changes like that always take months around here” (over-generalising) or “their team isn’t skilled enough to give us what we want” (labelling).
5. The key trick in increasing optimism and empowering individuals is to pause when one of these general disempowering statements is made, and ask yourselves “what evidence do we have for that?”. You will usually find that although there may be a grain of truth in your assumption, you have turned a grain into a mountain that stops you making progress.
6. Now, re-visit your assumptions, being as precise about what you know as possible. You will usually find that there are ways round the grain. So you can make something happen. Optimism will start to grow.
7. Once the team has the knack of analyzing its “disempowering thoughts and beliefs” on the fly, you can keep a watchful ear out in team meetings, catch yourselves when you see it happening and take a little bit longer to analyse the path forward and see if there is a way round the grain.
8. Similarly, when one of your team seems disempowered, you can take a bit of extra time with them helping them examine their assumptions. The first question should always be – are they scuppering their own success by making unrealistically negative assumptions? Using your finely tuned active listening skills, and having read our "How to coach" briefing, you can help them become more empowered and optimistic.