The Emotional Card Deck
I’ve used The Emotional Culture Deck a lot this year, I absolutely love it. A practitioner in NSW got me onto Jeremy Dean‘s work after she went to one of his master classes in Sydney earlier this year.
How it works
I’m shamelessly sharing the Riders&Elephants promo video here because it sums up the Emotional Culture Deck brilliantly and shows a few different ways to use it in a nifty 60 second bite (sound not required).
Why emotions matter
Most organisations and leaders don’t pay enough attention to how employees are or should be feeling. They underestimate how central emotions are to building the right culture and employee experiences. Positive feelings influence satisfaction, connection, motivation and engagement. They’re associated with productivity, performance, and quality. Negative feelings usually lead to negative outcomes and poor performance, and high turnover. Behavioural science tells us that emotion drives our behaviour. So when you understand and influence how your people feel, you can understand and influence their behaviour.
Jeremey Dean, riders&elephants
How I’ve used the Emotional Culture Deck
I’ve run workshops with leadership teams as well as with the whole teams to define their ways of working and create a conversation about the type of workplace they want to work in.
Using gamified facilitation techniques with the Emotional Culture Deck has worked magic with participants engaging in deep converations about how they want to feel at work and agreeing on habits they will create to support each other in the workplace.
There’s a tonne of neuroscience and behavioural science to support the object-based facilitation. That aside, the cards are a really fun way to have a super focussed, serious conversation (and there have been some real conversations about bullying behaviours in some of these workshops). And selfishly as a facilitator it’s a really fun workshop to facilitate.
One of the Emotional Culture Deck workshops I’ve run was themed around Star Wars “Leading with the Force”. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time (and the participants loved it). Even before the Culture Code (instead of a Jedi Code) was finalised, the team agreements were in use and they were using the “Force Boosters” as part of their new normal conversations. This in part was because the whole team was involved in shaping the culture conversation.
There is a wealth of digital resources, canvases and facilitiation guides that are unlocked when you purchase The Emotional Culture Deck. Jeremy and the team have absolutely nailed it. There is also a rather large community on LinkedIn that share the ways they’re using the cards.
You can buy them online here. If you want to try before you buy, the Riders&Elephants crew have a free download here.
Happy culture creation!
Over the last decade Lesleigh Ross has been leading project and change teams in complex delivery environments and transformation projects across public, private and not-for-profit sectors.
Leigh is highly skilled in industry best practice methodologies and frameworks which is demonstrated through her ability to deliver quality business outcomes across ‘green fields’ and recovery projects and programmes.
As a ‘digital native’ Leigh believes delivering innovation in business is only possible through collaborative project design where the business and technical teams work hand in hand. A geek in her own right Leigh is able to “degeek the geek” and facilitate effective engagement through all stages of project delivery.
Leigh is the current Queensland Lead for the Change Management Institute and a proud member of the Australian Institute of Project Management and the International Centre of Complex Project Management. She is active in her local chapters and national interest groups which are focused on improving the professionalism, diversity and inclusion within the project management community.