Positive Psychology at Work:

Organizational Culture

In April 2002 I was in a room with about 70 other facilitators being trained to deliver a two-day leadership development programme for what would be the largest UK Government department. This department had been newly created by the merger of two separate departments. The programme was to be delivered to 100 people at a time. One of the stated aims was to create culture change. The plan was to help the new department be people-rather than paper-oriented, customer-focused rather than status-conscious and creative rather than hidebound. To this end we were going to deliver a series of events across the country that would touch every manager in the new department.

We had finished the training and were moving on to the logistics of delivery when the internal team suddenly realized they hadn't addressed the problem of allocating facilitators to specific events. Clearly, it made little sense for us to be criss-crossing the country at random, but they had failed to ask us where we were all located. Their response to this was highly illuminating: ‘We'll email you all to ask where you come from. Then we'll go away, set up a spreadsheet and work it out.’ I had a suggestion. Since we were all there, we could organize ourselves by location, each corner of the room being a compass point, and then write a note of who was in each corner and their place of residence. Job done. This bit of self-organization was thought to be a risky and difficult idea but worth a try, so ...