"CONSCIOUSNESS" FOR A CONSCIOUS CULTURE
YOU CAN'T HAVE A CONSCIOUS CULTURE WITHOUT CONSCIOUS PEOPLE
ASSERTION
In my experience, businesses which operate from a conscious culture demonstrate the following outcomes: greater employee retention, easier recruitment, better work performance, higher quality work product, superior employee efficiencies, greater customer satisfaction, less management (which in turn requires less human and capital resources), stronger bottom-line and better top-line results.
Conscious is a Latin word whose original meaning was "knowing" or "aware." A conscious person has an awareness of their environment and their existence, emotions and thoughts. An essential part of a conscious culture is a culture (an ecosystem) that supports, promotes, and facilitates employees expanding their consciousness.
Conscious business culture can only be achieved in companies where the leader strongly believes becoming more conscious enhances the quality of not only their own life and effectiveness but the lives and effectiveness of people around them. If the intention of expanding consciousness doesn't exist for the leader, it won't exist in the culture.
Today, more and more companies are "woke" to the benefits of expanding consciousness throughout their workforce. You can't have a conscious culture without conscious people. And you can't have a conscious culture unless the leader wants greater consciousness for themselves and everyone around them.
OUR METHODOLOGY TO ACHIEVE A CONSCIOUS CULTURE
According to one of the greatest minds of our time, Buckminster Fuller, and a multitude of scholars, engineers, and scientists, the triangle is an enormously powerful structure. Triangles aren't just mathematically significant; they are also fundamental to the way we build our physical and virtual environments. Our consulting methodology of constructing and maintaining a conscious culture is developed using the triangle.
Our triangle is an Isosceles triangle, which means an equilateral triangle or one with equal sides. In this model, each side of the triangle is uniformly important and requires the necessary amount of attention, intention, capital support, and accountability, as well as the needed structures for existence.
Our work assists companies in building and maintaining their cultural triangle. The sides of the triangle are Purpose, Core Values and Self-Awareness. In unity and with equal power, they create a conscious culture.
Given our background of personal and client experiences, education and training in self-awareness and consciousness, as well as our decades of work in organizational development and performance, we find self-awareness to be the most direct and secular route to increase people's consciousness of themselves and their world.
We often encounter one, two, or sometimes all three of these sides of the triangle - purpose, core values, and self-awareness - as ineffectual intellectual concepts or just good intentions. When authentic commitment is missing to have people more conscious, more on purpose, more behaving in accord with the core values, the required work is to shift these elements to "higher ground." Purpose, core values, and self-awareness must be present in every individual in the company for the organization to have a conscious culture, albeit they will exist at varying intensities.
SELF-AWARENESS
"What's this self-awareness and consciousness stuff? Why do I need or want it? What will it do for the company? How much time will it take and what will it cost? What's the ROI? Do I have to participate or just my team? It's bunk. Gibberish. Hogwash. Flim-flam. Malarkey. Bullshit. Just another way for you guys to make money!"
We know going-in, incorporating self-awareness and consciousness as an integral part of a company will bring doubters and naysayers. Their questions and comments are not uncommon.
Fortunately, a majority of leaders realize how critical consciousness is to their professional and personal success and wellbeing. Consciousness gives them the needed edge to be a highly effective leader. But committing to raising consciousness throughout the company is a different matter. Often there is a hesitation from leaders to go "all-in," or even to "get their foot in the water."
From a consulting perspective, purpose and core values are far easier to work on than building the self-awareness side of the triangle. Rarely is there strong resistance to working on purpose and core values. Why? Because purpose and core values are familiar to most businesspeople.
Also, purpose and core values feel more objective and far less personal than self-awareness. They are safer territory. Purpose and core values are about "over there," whereas self-awareness is about "over here." Self-awareness is the person in the mirror. In self-awareness development, people need to be willing to take a hard and honest look at themselves.
BENEFITS OF SELF-AWARENESS
Self-awareness is a conscious knowledge of one's character, feelings, motives and desires. Being self-aware allows people to recognize previously unrecognized patterns that can cause interference, trouble or breakdowns - for themselves and others. Self-awareness is a proven road to expanding consciousness.
Being self-aware dramatically raises a person's willingness to be responsible.
Being self-aware shrinks egos and expands empathy and contribution.
Being self-aware increases humility.
Being self-aware expands appreciation and gratitude.
Being self-aware is the gateway to honest communication, appreciation and wholehearted truth-telling.
Being self-aware significantly improves authenticity and vulnerability.
Being self-aware dramatically increases team development and performance.
SUMMATION
When self-awareness is fundamental to a company, it directly impacts the way its people think and talk and how they treat each other. Self-awareness makes a demonstrable constructive difference.
On the purpose and core values sides of the triangle, being self-aware enhances the person's adoption of codes of behavior determined by the core values of the company and directly enhances people's ability to stay on purpose.
From the management side, the more self-aware the individual, the greater the level of responsibility the individual is willing to take on; the easier they are to manage and coach, and therefore more able to fulfill their responsibilities.
From the leadership side, when team members are self-aware of their strengths, weaknesses, default patterns and inner critics, team building and performance skyrockets.
Companies that engage in self-awareness expanding consciousness continue to show marked improvement in emotional intelligence, empathy, listening skills, critical thinking abilities and decision making. Companies participating in self-awareness expanding consciousness, find strengthened internal communications and relationships as well as enhanced leadership capabilities and capacities.
Those companies that strive for generating and sustaining a conscious culture, where purpose, core values and self-awareness are palpable throughout the organization, invariantly are more successful.
