Facilitators
When a company partners with one of our facilitators, the initial step is to establish a shared understanding of their core values and their significance. Once these values are clarified, the focus shifts to devising practical strategies for their implementation. This entails moving from abstract concepts to actionable plans, showcasing how each value will be translated into tangible actions by employees.
Crafting action-driven strategies necessitates collaboration, innovation, and strategic planning. It’s a multifaceted journey that demands expertise and guidance. Recognizing the potential strain on internal resources, we offer a cadre of seasoned professionals poised to support and steer your team through this transformative process.
Here are three of our distinguished facilitators:
My focus is on turning philosophical core value words and terms into actionable events. That is because I believe that today’s most important challenge for achieving a thriving workplace culture is well-defined, measurable, and communicated actions that support core values.
My work with human judgment (opinion) data began with my research on Judgment Modeling while on the faculty at the Univesity of Texas in Austin. As a “skunk works” project at my first company, I developed software for a “war room”. Participants around a custom oval-shaped table were each online with a computer terminal where they brainstormed, evaluated, and prioritized solutions for problems. This led to the starting of two companies in Austin around the same concepts. During this time, I was a co-founder of what became known as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). Later, I joined the Faculty at the Univesity of Nebraska where I was also a Gallup Senior Scientist. The Gallup experience led me to develop software related to employee engagement and wellbeing. From there I went to Bellevue University and started the Institute for Wellbeing. That morphed into what is now Cultures in Action. Now my primary interest deals with turning the philosophical words and terms that surround core values into actionable events.
Dr. Gerald R. Wagner
Les Landes provides consulting services in strategic planning, organizational communication, employee engagement, and performance improvement systems.
His work with organizations in developing values is grounded in his principles and practices for creating the shared meaning and related behaviors that are essential for a cohesive, high-performance culture of trust.
He emphasizes that while the words or phrases used to express organizational values should be chosen with care, what is more, important is making them real and relevant to an entire workforce by identifying the tangible decisions, actions, and behaviors that embody those value statements. Otherwise, the values tend to become dusty slogans tucked away out of reach and out of sight.
Making that connection requires giving employees a means of control over the actions and decisions that affect their lives in the workplace. Drawing on his expertise as a Certified Lean Six Sigma Professional, Les helps organizations provide employee control through processes and tools for engaging all team members in systematic continuous improvement as a routine part of their regular business operations.
He is the former head of corporate communication for one of the world’s largest food companies where he was responsible for corporate advertising, public and media relations, consumer affairs, employee communication, and creative services. He also played a major role in developing and implementing the company’s quality management system.
Les Landes
For organizations and individuals alike, I take great joy in facilitating space to help others (re)discover, name, and align their core values with their work – and so fuel a sustained season of fresh vitality, creativity, and growth.
Having served as an Army Chaplain and a Pastor/Head of Staff for two decades in diverse, multigenerational churches, I have experienced first-hand that when an organization collaboratively crafts its core values and then acts on those values in ways that are observable and celebrated – it changes everything. The entire organization breathes with fresh creativity, the kind of teamwork that builds upon differences, and a continual sense of possibility. It is freeing for people to know what they stand for, what supports them, and what success looks like.
Oppositely, I have discovered that nearly every single challenge around communication, motivation, and teamwork centers around a failure to name, claim, and honor organizational values. Indeed, much of the exhaustion, depletion, and burnout that organizations face today has less to do with needing more rest and more to do with needing an authentic alignment between the organizational values and the work being done.
It is no different in my leadership coaching at the individual level. In nearly every instance, the significant tiredness that individual leaders face has to do with a misalignment between their internal values and their external work.
Dr. Bobby Hulme-Lippert
Software Support
Company teams and consultants have a software application that handles data collection, sharing, analysis, and presentation. This software is one of the tools at http://www.fastvote.net.
The Team
Carrying out the process is one of group process facilitation. There is a great deal of brainstorming, communication, compromising, and analyses involved in arriving at a consensus among the company team. It’s unreasonable to expect company team members to shoulder additional workload so we have highly qualified associate professionals to assist and guide them. Project details, including fees, are negotiated between the potential client and facilitator independent of Cultures in Action. If you would like to see two examples of our exceptional facilitators, click here.
