Have you ever tried to improve yourself in some way, while you’re surrounded by people that don’t support your efforts? It’s like swimming against the current. This is exactly what happens in companies when certain individuals are committed to their growth, but the culture around them is not. But when companies establish cultures of growth, where everyone is encouraged and excited to improve themselves personally and professionally, then everyone improves rapidly. And so does the company.

Companies with positive cultures that values employee development get many business benefits, right down to the bottom line. The better the company culture, “the higher the performance in profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.”

Here are a few general guidelines for creating a positive culture of growth:

• Establish psychological safety in the workplace – Foster social connections. Encourage individuals to ask for help from one another and share their stories and vulnerabilities with one another. Doing so will develop psychological safety, which, Google learned, “more than anything, [is] critical to making a team work.” The bonds between individuals facilitate openness and creativity by blending life and work to make both more meaningful.
• Support others as a leader - While it is helpful to have coworkers have rapport amongst themselves, as a leader, you also need to provide security to those individuals. According to Daniel Goleman, doing so will encourage exploration, risk-taking, and innovation that can ultimately help satisfy work and life goals.
• Maintain this supportive environment - Great buildings can still topple if not cared for. Make an effort to keep up the culture that was created. Have social outings with people from work. Take the time to catch up with what’s going on in people’s lives. And be sure to reward and encourage people for the growth that they do make, work-related or not. Because it is when people can recognize the fulfillment in work do they feel more motivated for what they do.

There are many specific tactics one can take to create positive cultures. For example, the CEO of one of our client companies made her team’s bonuses for that year dependent not just on their financial performances, but also on how far they had moved toward clearly articulated growth goals. Within six months, individuals flourished and the team performance increased dramatically.

Our goal with The Emerge System is to help clients establish positive cultures of growth. The system not only helps participants develop their self-awareness, connection, confidence, and power, but also gives them the access to immersive content to help them keep growing and trains them to support their peers after the facilitator leaves.

If you would like to take some initial steps to creating a culture of growth, try starting your next team meeting asking everybody to share one aspect of their leadership that they feel is underdeveloped. Then ask them what support they could receive to develop it.

Growing or even taking the steps to grow is not easy. But both the process and benefits are very much worth it. Contact us if you’d like to explore how Self Emergence can help you establish a culture of growth at your company.