Employee morale has everything to do with employee values. The higher the alignment between the business's culture and its emplyees' values, the less anyone has to think about morale per se. It's no accident that morale and morals have the same root. In international studies, culture has been determined to be one of the most important indicators of sustained success.

Bandaid "morale boosters" won't truly sustain any business in tough times. In fact the costs and distractions can be draining. However, even the exact same investment in the exact same activity can yield very different results when the entire culture is values-driven.  Find out what matters to employees and make way for their answers because when employees have to check their values at the door, entropy results. (Entropy = resources not devoted to mission accomplishment.)

Create a business culture where people can bring their whole selves to work and high morale becomes a way of being rather than something to chase after. Even on bad days, especially on bad days, strong cultures are able to count on a high base level of morale. There's a prevailing myth that in tough times nobody can afford to deal with "fluffy" things like culture - a fallacy with absolutely nothing to back it up except fear. The down times can be the most fertile times for building a company with the kind of interconnectedness that holds together through thick and thin.

Wheatley talks about fields:

"I can’t touch it but I know what it is.  What we’re doing is creating a field
through making things truly personal.  At the heart, we’re
encouraging personal meaning.  We’re reframing safety from
something that people need to the idea that being vulnerable is
something that people need.  This is where growth happens.  One
of my favourite quotes, I’m not sure who it’s attributed to, is ‘To
make meaning is human.  To choose the meaning we make is to be
leaders."

A Hard Decree

Last

Night

God

Posted

On the Tavern wall

A hard decree for all of love's inmates

Which read:

If your heart cannot find a joyful work

The jaws of this world will probably

Grab hold of your

Sweet

Ass.

Here's the link to an excellent video by Simon Sinek on being a leader who sparks inspired action.

How the brain makes us loyal to people and organizations who believe what we believe; how and why "purpose" matters; getting past the tipping point.

The "why" drives behavior yet few leaders capitalize on that neurological fact.

Simon Sinek:

How great leaders inspire action

A recent Huffington Post article highlights the role that millennial generation norms play in the Occupy Movement.

While millennials are demonstrating their values for a power-with vs. power-over system of organization, they are also demonstrating a more universal principle: how prophets say "no" and mystics say "yes."

It's unseasonably warm here on the East Coast but still the sharpness of fall is in the air. I'm a summer gal but there's something wonderful about fall air.

It's crisp - to the point. There's a special vitality that only comes with harvest. And to me, the air smells of promise.

The earthy churning and composting in this particular turn of seasons is a good metaphor to play with on the job:

What needs to die back and compost? What needs to be harvested? What seeds need to be saved? What possibility lies ahead?

Fall makes me mindful of Steve Jobs encouragement to "stay hungry and stay foolish." What do you hunger for and what might be worth a risk right now?

We're emerging from a power-over into a power-with paradigm of leadership. But even thought leaders are fish in the water of their own culture and so have blind spots about how they perpetuate old paradigm policies and behaviors.

An old paradigm behavior was to run over anyone who might "get in the way" of personal gain. That wasn't our oldest paradigm behavior. Measuring from the Big Bang, the dysfunction, death and greed that we have accepted as leadership occurs as a nanosecond - an isolated fall into a dangerous operative mythology about the human condition.

New paradigm leaders understand that it's better to rev people up than rev them over. They are trail blazers who ride the edge of creativity with much less certainty but far more stability than the dying breed who still doesn't get that the Golden Rule rules.