Emotional Culture Deck Training
Reflecting on utilizing the tool in leadership workshops.
This series of blogs is focusing on my Certified Consultant Course training through Riders & Elephants. My previous blog focused in on my own experience of the Emotional Culture Deck and what using the cards taught me in a real-world experience. This blog is concentrated on the different levels of using the tool and seeing how it works and the impact that it has in various different situations.
And I love how much we can use it in one-on-ones with people – whether that be within our own team, coaching or with individuals in a workplace. Using the ECD as a tool within our workshops in so many different forms, has been fascinating and encourages us to use it more and more.
When we first introduce emotions into workshops with leaders, there's often a little bit of shock. The topic met with unease and questions. People seem unsure about why we would be talking about emotions. How does this connect into the practical task-focused training we would normally expect?
When we share the reasoning and why we need to consider emotions, people quickly understand why this is such an important aspect of the organisational culture and a necessity in the workplace. The next challenge is usually when we ask people to talk about their own emotions. The complexity is in finding the right words to use and knowing what an emotional label is as opposed to some other kind of descriptor.
What do I mean? Well, when I've posed the question of `how did you feel in your best job versus how you felt in your worst job’, we often get very practical things about the work or about a person. What we are asking for is to describe the actual emotions, not the reasons for the emotions or the things that happened. This is where the Emotional Culture Deck comes into play and gives people words to choose from, eliminating and disarming that feeling of, “I actually don't know the words to choose”.
Seeing options displayed disarms some of the otherwise vulnerable feelings that people can have when we’re introducing this different topic of conversation. It also shows just how many words there are to choose from, not the half a dozen that we generally reach for to describe how we feel.
We might think of the basics in terms of emotional states. States like happy, sad, angry, excited, but it goes so much deeper than that. And actually those are usually an umbrella term for so many other emotions.
The cards help us to dig deeper, but one thing I wanted to share is the way in which the tool is used around change. Some experiences to explain the focus around the ECD tool I can share are:
Getting leaders to reflect on how they feel themselves during change and being really honest about that:
What do they find challenging about change? What makes them excited about change? Having their own awareness as a leader moving into change will really help them consider their behaviour that connects to those emotions. This is important to understand when they are trying to successfully navigate a team through change as well.
Leaders leading change:
And over the last six months there has been a lot of change happening in businesses. A lot of it being restructures or downsizing or having to look for efficiencies. One restructure we were involved in in 2023 was the perfect opportunity to actually connect with leaders about how they're feeling about those changes. What is also important was for them to gain a perspective of ‘how did they want their team to feel during change’, using the ECD tool as a prompt.
Often feelings and emotions like supported, calm, appreciated bubbled to the top of the pile. When the narrative was flipped and we got them to think about how they would prefer people not to be feeling, emotions such as anxious, afraid, disconnected or unsupported were chosen. Pretty clear right?!
Once we can be aware of the emotions that we are hoping to promote and those that we would like to minimize (knowing that they will, from time-to-time pop up), we gain a direction to think about the actions that are going to help us create those feelings. So often in change we are very focused on the process and the outcomes, but change doesn't happen without people changing. And most of us want that change to happen successfully.
The aim is to gain positive outcomes with as little damage to the people involved as possible. Then to get on with whatever that new version looks like. So without a focus on how we want people to feel and how they are feeling during that process, we are less likely to get the outcomes that we are needing, including the damage left behind as ask people to move forward.
And so we've seen that approach being very positive, both for the leaders themselves, but also for the change processes that have happened by being considerate of the people's emotions who are directly and indirectly impacted by those changes.
The last piece
The last piece that goes with this experience is considering how we want people to feel after the change. More focus is likely to come into how we feel during the change, but also we need to be mindful of the impact of those emotions out the other side. We need to keep in mind that people will be more engaged, more motivated, more creative, better collaborators and better decision makers when they're feeling more of the desired feelings.
That is, we need to be purposeful about what we need to feel out the other side of change when we are now in a new environment or process or structure to allow for the positive outcomes of that change to shine through. The alternative is people feeling those undesired emotions that will negatively impact their engagement, motivation, decision making, collaboration, problem solving, and so on.
Final thoughts
So to sum it up, my highlight of using the emotional culture deck with individuals and in workshops has been bringing the people element to change. The practicality and disarming nature of the Emotional Culture Deck has led to some drastically better outcomes for the people who are impacted by change. By giving words as prompts to answer questions has enabled conversations to flow, for emotions to be linked to actions and to solidify the connection of emotions to impact.
So it's been a very positive experience for me. I see this being used in many different change situations. If we consider the small changes we make every day or week without much thought, they can accumulate and lead to a cycle of change, exhaustion, change, fatigue, change, and frustration. By consciously adopting a perspective that focuses on these incremental adjustments, we can effectively mitigate the negative repercussions typically associated with change.
Because after all, change is our only constant.
If you ever want to talk through how this would help your team or your business, I am always happy to do that. But if nothing else, hopefully this is just some food for thought.