Build a culture that thrives in tough times

Culture is invisible, expressed indirectly through common behaviors and norms across the company. It is what people expect others to do, to follow to inexplicit cultural norm of this ‘tribe’.

Yes, organizational culture can be changed. However, since this often times involves the change of many people across different business units, locations and even countries, this takes time.

Since culture change is a long-term process, starting to change the climate (or micro-culture) of a team is a faster and more effective way to drive bottom up change in an organization.

A company culture is considered dysfunctional when the cultural norms get in the way of productivity and goals, and instead is focused on drama and divisiveness created by unhealthy competition and lack of trust, lack of abundance thinking, and psychological safety. These often unspoken key aspects prevent people from feeling safe enough to take risks, thus limiting their creativity.

There are many ways that a negative organizational culture can manifest, such as dysfunctional workplace management, but the outcomes are similar. There is a dysfunctional corporate culture when the behaviors and systems encourage competition within teams, discourage trust, and not enable psychological safety. These sometimes unspoken aspects of culture prevent employees from feeling safe enough to take risks, thus limiting their creativity.

Corporate dysfunction arises in the behavior of leaders and employees and often shows up within team dynamics. Four common patterns of dysfunctional workplace behaviors set the wrong tone for success. Here are the four clues that tell you that you might have a toxic culture: Power-seeking and dominant behavior, Status-seeking and diminishing behavior, Approval-seeking and blaming behavior, and Attention-seeking and fabricating behavior.

A company that is agile is healthy. The underlying and central ingredient of an agile culture is strong internal character, allowing innovation likely to occur. Way beyond “soft skills'', being agile means showing up focused, influential, and driven toward a common goal. Specifically, it means operating from wisdom, courage, resilience, and humanity all at once.

In particular, personality assessment for employees can be valuable when appropriately used in the workplace. Such assessments measure persistent differences in how people perceive and interact across situations. Personality is related to job performance and can be one of several assessments used in an effective and legally defensible selection process. Personality assessments can also be useful tools in leadership development and team development. The feedback can help individuals understand themselves and others and offer strategies to engage in productive and respectful interactions. Ultimately, the utility of personality assessments depend on matching the organization’s goals with an assessment to help meet those goals.

HR practitioners can use strengths-based personality assessments in many ways, including; personal development, performance management, employee relations, human due diligence, culture transformation, and more.

Most personality assessments are not reported on a holistic framework, so they don’t show you where your individual patterns are most useful in the full picture. For example, if you learn that your True Tilt is "Clarity," you see where that fits in the whole and where you may fall short if you don't develop holistically.

Many personality assessments don’t provide memorable results. And what you can't remember, you won't be likely to apply. Yes, people are more complex than four patterns, but most business leaders don't have time to learn numerous letter combinations and types that are not linked to a business framework. The Tilt patterns are easy to remember because they clearly describe the associated behavioral patterns. For example, "Connection" Tilts enjoy making and maintaining social connections. Tilt addresses the additional complexity of humans through the Tilt Amplifier, which is unique to each individual.

Most personality tools assume that your behavior will not change, so they don't give you an option to take a follow up assessment to see how you've developed yourself over time. Tilt 365 also offers the Positive Influence Predictor, a 360-feedback assessment which gives you instant, continuous feedback from other individuals on how well you have developed the same character strengths measured by the True Tilt Personality assessment.

To take a deeper dive, visit our two blogs on why we built a better personality assessment for agile teams, and the slightly brighter truth behind personality assessments. You can also skip right to finding your strengths in as little as 5 minutes by taking the True Tilt Personality assessment.

Personality assessments are different from employee surveys in that they analyze the way individuals behave, as opposed to individuals’ viewpoints.