Cultural Brilliance: The DNA of Organizational Excellence
With Host Claudette Rowley – Transformation Talk Radio – Every 2nd & 4th Friday 10 AM (PT)/1 PM (ET)
“Let Your Blind Spots Lead You to a Brilliant Culture”
With Special Guest Rosemary Strunk
I had the pleasure of interviewing Rosemary Strunk on my show Cultural Brilliance Radio. Rosemary is the co-founder of Living Courageously, LLC, a coaching and consulting company that helps individuals, teams and organizations recognize and invest in their unique talents, foster a strength-based culture and navigate with enhanced emotional intelligence skills. As a cultural anthropologist, she is skilled at uncovering patterns of behaviors and beliefs that may be at odds with stated organizational values that stall performance and drain revenue. Rose is also a certified Gallup Strengths Coach, a Leadership Business Strengths Communicator and a Six Sigma yellow belt. She recently gave a continuing legal education course entitled “Navigating Blind Spots Before They Become Land Mines” for the New Mexico State Bar Association, and a workshop on “Strength-Based Emotional Intelligence” for the Northwest Equal Employment Opportunity Association. Today, Rosemary and I will explore leadership and organizational culture through the lens of blind spots.
Below is an article written by the Conscious Business Radio team about the show.
Cultural Brilliance helps you experience groundbreaking ways to transform your company’s culture. Host Claudette Rowley invites some of the foremost experts on organizational culture to help understand how to make a brilliant culture the rule rather than the exception.
Claudette had the opportunity to speak with Rosemary Strunk. Rosemary is co-founder of Living Courageously, LLC, a coaching/consulting company that helps individuals, teams and organizations recognize and invest in their unique talents, foster a strength-based culture, and navigate with enhanced emotional intelligence skills. Rose began her career in Minneapolis after graduating from Grinnell College and Mitchell Hamline Law School in 1985. Over the course of her career, she has worked in multiple industries and has held in-house counsel and management positions in Seattle, Scottsdale, Santa Fe and is now based in Portland, Oregon. Her practice areas and management roles have included labor and employment, real property and management, commercial development, transactional work, compliance, governmental relations, IT and HIPAA/security, M&A, IP, finance, behavioral health, business development and customer relationships. Rosemary is also part of the Lawyers as Change Makers movement, the Culture Academy and a graduate of the Search Inside Yourself Institute Mindfulness-based Emotional Intelligence for Leaders program.
Today’s discussion starts with an explanation of the term “blind spots”. As Rosemary says, it’s a fun nomenclature for the concept itself, because it refers to aspects of ourselves of which we are not aware. So how do we become aware of them, and why wouldn’t we be aware of them in the first place? It turns out thatwe are predisposed to blind spots due to our neurology. We have built-in, natural biases that have helped us survive and thrive as a species. As we create these biases, we develop “blind spots” or filters through which we view the world. . Our social, economic, and educational background also influence our blind spots and our corresponding perspectives. . Sometimes, we have blind spots because we’re honestly avoiding looking at the full impact of our actions on ourselves and on others. For example, we may not want to experience the discomfort of understanding how we are affecting others. As a result, it can be easier to believe that we’re right and continue on our life.
Rosemary continues with the conversation by stating that there is not a cure for blind spots. We are always going to have blind spots – we have them individually, as teams, organizationally, as families, and as societies. . However, we can become more aware of our blind spots by ,seeking regular feedback from people who are going to be honest with us. Once we begin to notice how other people receive what we’re saying or how we’re acting, we can begin to increase our awareness of the impact we have on others.
Sometimes we can overestimate or underestimate our abilities. As a result of this blind spot, I might not ask for help, or I might also complete tasks that someone else has more aptitude to do. If I’m in a team or organizational environment, I may then eliminate an opportunity for a colleague to shine and contribute because I didn’t recognize that I should let them take the lead.
Rosemary also mentions that blind spots surface when we get triggered — when the survival part of our brain has been activated.This happens when we anticipate or perceive that we are being threatened.. Often, many people don’t realize they are being triggered, and being unaware, they are pulled into their survival brain – into fight, flight, or freeze. The seed of our emotions is also the seed of our memory and motivation.
To listen to the full show, click here
For more information on Rosemary Strunk, visit her website at www.living-courageously.com
Click here for Claudette Rowley’s website, Cultural Brilliance
(Archived episodes available at www.culturalbrilliance.com and www.transformationtalkradio.com)
