One of the most significant aspects of how a work environment operates is the culture. It is so vital to understand how people operate culturally, as this will ensure that you are creating an environment that is comfortable for each employee.

As a manager, you can use Culture Pulse to be a better leader by knowing how to guide and coach employees to an end result or goal.

Everyone has a different Organizational Effectiveness style, and Culture Pulse measures this through means vs. goal.

Means-oriented people enjoy the process of getting to the goal, while goal-oriented people enjoy reaching the goal and the results.

For example, the employee below is means-oriented. You can lead and support this employee by setting deadlines and milestones, doing regular check-ins, and asking about how the process is going.

You can better understand your team by looking at the group identity. A lot of what forms culture is individual preferences for how the group should interact and relate to each other.

In Culture Pulse, it is broken down into community vs. professional. Someone with a community group identity focuses on the people around them and identifies with them, while someone with a professional group identity will focus more on work and identify with their job title and profession.

For example, if you notice that the employee to the right goes straight back to work after lunch even while everyone else is talking for a couple of minutes, you might look to their group identity to understand that since they have a professional group identity, they are more inclined to focus on their job rather than relationships.

One way to deal with conflict is through Organizational Control, which demonstrates how people control outcomes. This is broken down into loose vs. strict organizational control, loose being content with unpredictability and uncertainty, and strict trying to prevent risk by planning and being organized.

If someone with strict organizational control is working on a project with the employee below, there may be an imbalance or disagreement with deadlines, but looking to this section of Culture Pulse can help to identify why the employees are having these issues, and they can create a plan moving forward.

When training employees, it is important to know their personal approach preferences before you start so that you know how best to converse with them.

A new employee may already be timid coming into an office depending on who they are, and training might be their first impression of you, so you don’t want to be over- or underwhelming to them.

Someone who is approachable will likely hold a longer and more open conversation, possibly diving into personal life, while someone guarded is almost the opposite. If the employee to the right is the one you’re training, be open to having a conversation and ask many questions to make them feel at home.

When running meetings, it is useful to know your team’s audience orientation. The audience orientation can be split into internally driven vs. externally driven.

If someone is internally driven, they are motivated by their beliefs, while someone who is externally driven is motivated by what others think. If you are in a 1:1, figure out what this person’s audience orientation is.

If they are internally driven, talk to them about their values, and communicate these along with their beliefs when talking about goals and assigning tasks, as this will reinforce what they internally believe to be true.

If they are externally driven, you may be able to create a vision together, and they will likely reflect your desires and reactions to tasks, goals, and finished work.

When you have a group meeting, delegate and set goals including both sides of this audience orientation to appeal to the whole team.

To best know how to delegate tasks and motivate employees, management philosophy is almost necessary for happy employees.

You never want your employees to feel like they’re being ignored if they are support-oriented and want affirmation that their work is a success, but you also don’t want your performance-oriented employees to feel like they are being suffocated by you constantly checking in on them about their work, but instead want to know that their goal is valuable.

Those that are support-oriented want to feel inspired, while those who are performance-oriented would rather have benchmarks set for them to accomplish.

If you have a meeting with someone support-oriented, check in with them regularly and affirm them that their progress is valuable, and give them work that allows for little wins and regular recognition, while you should help set goals and benchmarks for those who are performance-oriented, as they will feel motivated when they reach these.

Culture pulse is great to use in 1:1s, as many of the elements involved contain information on motivating employees, which is useful in a 1:1. Here are more tips for Using Cloverleaf for Successful 1:1s.

Cloverleaf has a lot to offer, so check out our blog or other articles about the TEAM Dashboard.