Are you harbouring a problem with communication that doesn't seem to have a cause? Do you suspect a glitch in the information flow but can't pin it down to anything concrete? In your quest for cohesive leadership, you may be finding that some are far more aligned with your mission than others. What do you do?
Relationships are subject to all kinds of power struggles, with various forms of cause and effect; on the whole we are able only to see what is 'being done' to us and largely unaware of what we're doing to the other person. Empathy and self-management are pretty critical additions to the soft-skill toolkit these days, for companies want more than ever to be fostering healthy environments. Wages aside, people come to work expecting more respect, and the demand for self-worth is not only valid, it's proving that mentality directly affects productivity.
Self-management is a pre-requisite for cultural transformation. While no-one is to blame for negativity taking hold, everyone concurrently needs to step up to the plate in counteracting it. Awareness and empathy may represent new features of workplace protocol to a lot of people, and given that we have very little (if any) grounding in our early years in this respect, it's reasonable to expect a degree of fear at the outset.
In a healthy workplace, people enjoy coming in every day. They know their workmates have home lives of their own to contend with and have built a foundation of empathy that allows for various emotions to be recognised and understood. Sharing ground in appreciation of each other's roles and values, a culture that has positivity at heart will sweep away power struggles and back-biting to bring about a flow of communication that's productive and innovative. This is why a strong foundation of best-practice self-management is so essential to culture transformation.
Here's an article https://www.simplypsychology.org/gaslighting-at-work.html (shared on LinkedIn by Jonathan Willson of Stop Hurt at Work) that outlines a behaviour with which we're all familiar. Society has not taught us well in the art of self-analysis, so we are left with a set of conditions which in the main are erroneous when it comes to the way we view ourselves - good leadership comes with a recognition that none of us are perfect, personal development a perpetual work-in-progress.
As part of a consortium of companies based in the engineering sector, we find common ground in facing situations wherein protection of power and information, particularly in the mid-management sector, becomes prioritised above the health of the company - a dangerous keg of destructive potentials that often goes undetected, even though the affected organisation may be well aware that there's a problem.
For updates on solutions and help with cultural crises, follow https://www.linkedin.com/company/82163290 and get in touch for a confidential chat.