Spin Your Web of Thriving

Have you ever thought about what characterizes a healthy organization to you and your colleagues?

We asked ourselves this question at DDC a couple of years ago, and that resulted in seven overall criteria we believe are essential for all of us working at the DDC, both as individuals and as a work community.

These seven criteria have become a cornerstone in evaluating our overall thriving as an organization, our individual thriving, and, most importantly, how to assess the relationship between individual mental thriving and organizational wellbeing.

We use a very simple tool to facilitate otherwise difficult conversations about well-being. Particularly in our one-to-one leadership relations (read about the concept of personal leadership here), this tool comes in handy in identifying opportunities not just to elevate one’s own well-being but also opportunities for you to influence the overall well-being of the organization.

You can use the tool in several ways:

1. You can use it to better understand whether your well-being is primarily caused by the mood or well-being of the organization or something related to you personally.
2. You can use it to start a conversation with a colleague to help her open up about things that bother her and relate it to opportunities to do something about it.
3. You can use it in a bigger group to test the degree of a shared perception of the ‘health’ of the organization.

No matter how you decide to use the tool, you must start by defining your specific criteria for a healthy organization. If you are to use this tool alone, you might focus on what criteria you believe to be paramount for you to thrive in a workplace. If you are to use the tool with your colleagues, we suggest you discuss this in depth. Feel free to use our seven criteria as inspiration.