The Emotional Culture Deck can be used to stimulate meaningful discussions among leaders. Asking the question, "How do you want people to feel and not feel when they join your organisation?" can profoundly impact defining an effective onboarding strategy.

Here's why this question is so powerful:

1. Encourages empathy: By asking this question, leaders are prompted to put themselves in the shoes of new employees, fostering an empathetic mindset. They'll start to appreciate the emotional needs of their people and create a welcoming onboarding process that caters to those needs.

2. Prioritises emotional well-being: This question makes it clear that emotions count in our workplace. It underscores the importance of emotional well-being. Leaders who understand the significance of emotional well-being are more likely to create a positive work environment that supports employee engagement and satisfaction.

3. Clarifies expectations: The question encourages leaders to...

TRANSFORMATION IS A DECISION OF THE HEART, NOT THE HEAD - such a beautiful and insightful POV from Jeremy Dean, founder of riders&elephants in New Zealand, in this latest episode of "Let Go & Lead" with Gagen MacDonald founder Maril Gagen MacDonald.

As Maril and Jeremy discuss, the conversation around EMOTIONS has been taboo in the workplace - but emotions drive every action and decision we make.

Such a great discussion and a real call-to-arms to more explicitly have long overdue conversations about emotions with your teams. 

Watch the full onversation below.

The ultimate leadership toolkit.

Join one of three ECD Have a Play Leadership Workshops coming up in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom:

• Melbourne, November 2nd – Click here to register (Only 9 spots left)
• London, November 3rd – Click here to register.
• Wellington, November 21st – Click here to register.

What is The ECD Have a Play Leadership Workshop?

In this interactive and hands-on workshop, you'll learn how to use the Emotional Culture Deck in four key areas we believe are essential to human leadership: Effective Team Check-ins, Human-centred Leadership, Leading Change, and Impactful Stakeholder Relationships.

You’ll be posed a bunch of 'beautiful questions' to explore these areas and use the ECD as a tool to navigate these questions. It’s a ‘sandpit environment’ where you come along, get your hands on the deck and experiment and learn together. 

Presented by ECD Certified Consultants

ECD Have a Play...

Thanks to everyone within our wider ECD community that continues to show courage, bravery and determination to flip the workplace culture conversations and humanise the places we all work.

This is only a snapshot of all the inspiring moments we've seen this month of people using the #emotionalculturedeck to help the people they serve find the words and express themselves.

Thank you all!

This article is reposted from Te Mahau – click here to read the original.

When Greg Sharland took the reins as acting principal, he set out to explore the question: What are the key requirements for being responsive to the needs of students and staff at that particular period of time? His thoughts were: ‘if I can get staff into a really good place and get them functioning well, everything is going to flow from that’.  Rather than just focusing on the desired staff behaviours, Greg and the Senior Leadership Team decided to concentrate on supporting the emotions that drive good behaviours.  “If you get the emotions right and you get the emotional culture right, then the behaviour will flow from that,” says Greg.

The team examined the work of Jeremy Dean who promotes emotional leadership that has an awareness of the importance of emotions and the need to understand people and where they are emotionally. They applied Jeremy Dean’s...

This article was written by Claire Marriott and originally posted on LinkedIn here.

As we continue to try and navigate these unprecedented times, we can firmly hold onto strategies such as the setting of smart goals. This gives the organisation, its respective individuals, and teams something concrete to work towards and help them steer through. When it comes to goal setting though how might we do this better? we talk about SMART and motivating goals yet how often do we really connect in with our emotions and how we feel about our goals.  

Setting the right goals may seem like an easy thing to do, but in practice while it’s a goal and it follows all of the SMART measures, an emphasis on targets and challenges that people need to work towards, we can often find is there is no energy towards actually achieving these. For goals to help us learn and grow we have to be motivated by them.  When it comes to motivation our emotions act as the guide, they...

There is no one way to exercise leadership.

But emotion is critical.

Because emotion helps you understand who you are working with. It also helps you build relationships with your people based on who they are – not who you are.

Emotional leadership involves:

Awareness of the importance of emotions - yours and others - and their impact on individuals and the team as a whole. Then using that emotional awareness and understanding to shape the culture of the team positively

Understanding your people, where they are emotionally and being able to help them manage their unpleasant feelings and express pleasant feelings

Sharing your vulnerability and leading by permitting people to bring their whole selves to work

Creating an environment where people's feelings matter and it's safe to express themselves fully.
You - the leaders - set the tone.

You must bring your whole self to work. Separating yourself from leadership is not an option. Separating yourself from your emotions is not an...

Learn from Tim Corbett, CEO Sir John Kirwan Foundation about how he's used The ECD (and Customer Experience Deck and Wellbeing Decks) as part of their journey to uncover what makes their organisation and people thrive, from the ‘inside, out’ and then used that to shape the wairua and ‘glue’ of their team.

"Yesterday [I] caught up with our Lead Coach who has taken the feedback and insights generated during the ECD work and implemented it in how she communicates and connects with her team. She’s noticing a huge difference for her and the coaches – that’s awesome."

Here's what else Tim had to say about using The Emotional Culture Deck:

"The decks from R&E are gems. We used them to uncover what makes us thrive, from the ‘inside, out’ and then used that to shape the wairua and ‘glue’ of our team. The ECD was a great process to peel back the layers and then rebuild what works for us, adding on the Wellness Deck then...

This episode of the ECD Conversation Series with Steve & Lotty is all about fear. The fears and worries we have when using The ECD and facilitating ECD workshops. 

Lotty and Steve discuss the things they feel fearful about when introducing and using the ECD in workshops and how can we manage these fears and regulate our responses to them.

They acknowledged that fears are normal, natural, powerful and a basic human emotion. Fear alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological and whilst fear can stem from real threats, it can also originate from imagined dangers that never come to pass.

The fears that might arise from using the ECD are highly unlikely to come to pass and knowing that is important so we can acknowledge our fears, walk alongside them for a while, and learn what they have to teach us, whilst at the same time ensuring they do not paralyse us and lead us astray.

Questions we explore in...