Mindful in 5 Podcast

Building a Conscious Team Culture

• Spiwe Jefferson • Season 5 • Episode 152

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Tame Stress with the Mindful in 5 Stress to Success Blueprint

Unlock the secret to transforming your workplace culture with mindfulness and shared values. Let's explore what it takes to create a conscious team environment that elevates both personal and collective achievement. 

Drawing from my experience as a leader in a legal department, I'll walk you through a simple four-step process that has been instrumental in fostering unity and joyful collaboration among team members. By channeling productive childlike qualities such as trust and creativity, you can infuse a sense of optimism and resilience into your team's daily dynamics, ensuring every interaction is intentional and fulfilling.

In this episode, you'll discover how to harness the power of a beginner's mind to redefine your team's culture. Join the ranks of Mindful Ninjas and explore science-backed strategies that help you achieve a harmonious and supportive work atmosphere. Learn how to align personal and team values for higher performance and job satisfaction, and hear personal anecdotes illustrating the transformative impact of these practices. Whether your company already has core values or is starting from scratch, this episode promises to empower you with practical techniques that create a joyful and thriving work environment.


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Spiwe Jefferson:

Welcome to Mindful in 5, where busy professionals find your peaceful oasis to thrive in complex work environments. I am Spiw Jefferson attorney, certified mindfulness practitioner and author of the Mindful in 5 book series. Here to guide you to a clearer, softer and more supported life. Join me and your fellow Mindful Ninjas as we explore science-backed mindfulness strategies for successful leaders that you can implement, starting with just five minutes a day. Elevate your work, empower your life, work higher, live stronger. Let's go. Do you sense a lack of unity in your team, with clouded communication and a disconnect from shared purpose? A weak team culture can dim the cheerful atmosphere of collaboration, leaving members feeling unsupported and detached from the joyful potential of collective achievement of collective achievement. Today, our topic is building a conscious team culture that will bring a clearer, more peaceful approach to your workplace dynamics. And if you're wondering about the cute kids in imagery this season, we are embracing the beginner's mind by channeling childlike qualities trust, authenticity, creativity, resilience and optimism to transform our mindfulness practice and daily lives. Let our playful cover art inspire you to approach each day with fresh eyes and an open heart. Imagine leading a team that moves with harmonious energy, each member feeling joyfully aligned with a shared vision, by fostering a conscious team culture, you can create a softer, more supportive environment where everyone thrives. Let's explore a unifying technique called the values alignment exercise. Here's how this clear process works. Step 1. Have each team member peacefully reflect on their top three personal values. Step two share these values in a group, fostering cheerful understanding. Step three collectively identify three to five shared team values with joyful consensus. Step four for each value, define specific behaviors that demonstrate it, creating clear supportive guidelines. Research shows that teams with clearly defined shared values experience higher performance and more peaceful job satisfaction.

Spiwe Jefferson:

I have to tell you, I actually have a set of values for my team. I lead the legal department at my company and earlier this year we had an offsite meeting and one of the things we did was come up with shared values for our department. What I have noticed and this was truly a shared exercise, so our company already had core values that were clear and well-established, but part of the reason we came up with values was because we wanted to come up with how do we, as a legal function, service our internal clients and how do we think about the work that we do in relationship to the larger organization. And we really did spend the time. You know, as the general counsel, I actually did not go into that exercise with a predefined set of values that I was trying to steer the team towards. It was really a process where we together said who are we and, against the backdrop of our corporate values, how do we want to infuse that into the work we do and what does that look like? And so this is how we came up with our values. So, collectively, we came up with these values and as a team, they have been the underpinning of how we think about the way that we work and the way that we service our internal clients, that we service our internal clients, and it really has worked. It allows us to go back to a shared vision for everything from how we think about contracts to how we think about talking with our internal stakeholders, how we solve problems together, the role that legal and compliance play in advancing the strategic objectives of the organization. All that, for us, comes back to how do we do that in light of these values that we created. So I'm here to tell you we didn't go through exactly this one, two, three, four step process, but we essentially embodied these four components and coming up with those values and it works. It really does.

Spiwe Jefferson:

And also, the other thing that I hope you got out of this is it doesn't matter if your company already has core values that you have established. Company already has core values that you have established. You still, within your team, have the power to figure out and understand together how do we work in our environment to service our business, to service our stakeholders and to achieve the goals that we have for the year. And to achieve the goals that we have for the year, research shows that teams with clearly defined shared values experience higher performance and more peaceful job satisfaction. I tried to leave you with some thought-provoking perspective in each one of these episodes, so today, here is what I would suggest. A conscious team culture isn't built by chance, but by clear, joyful intention in every interaction. So here is your tearful challenge for the week. Thank you. Implement the values alignment exercise with your team, notice how it brings a softer, more unified energy to your collective efforts.

Spiwe Jefferson:

And if you are ready to transform either your personal performance or your team culture, I have created a free set of blueprint overviews. That is a growing list at spewyjeffersoncom in the downloadables section for you to take a look at. The first one was on how do you bounce back from setbacks, and that was followed by stress, to success. And so take a look and see the growing list that is available for you and that addresses the various aspects that we all deal with in our working lives, and the idea is, if you can tame things at work, then you can bring those tactics home with you too.

Spiwe Jefferson:

So what are your values in your home? That is a good question, as you, for those of you especially who are raising children, what are the values that you are teaching your babies? And that really matters, because those babies will become citizens of the world and they will become other people's co-workers. And I can always tell people who grew up in a home where they either did not learn their family values or they were just allowed to run the roost, because then they show up at work and they expect to do the same thing, and sometimes they're not as well received, and that causes problems not just for them, but also for their teams. So think about values Values at home, values at work. Remember, creating a strong team culture is an ongoing process of clear intention and joyful reinforcement. By consistently nurturing your shared values, you are creating a more peaceful, supportive and successful work environment for everybody in your work environment. May your team be united in joyful, clear purpose. Until next week, this is Spiwe saying be mindful and be well.

James@DiscovertheVoice:

Be mindful and be well book and journal from spewayjeffersoncom, or unsigned copies from Amazon, barnes, noble or wherever you get your books. Visit spewayjeffersoncom to download sample chapters of the book, watch videos and become a mindful ninja. Join us on the LinkedIn Mindful in 5 group and share your thoughts Until next. Next time, be mindful and be well.