062: Marcella Bremer—Build a Better Business With an Amazing, Positive Culture

Listen now to Marcella Bremer teach us about the power of a positive workplace!

Can you build better businesses by building more positive, powerful cultures in which people can work with joy instead of dread? Yes! Think about it. Why should work take away our energy instead of energizing us? Why should people feel diminished in their workplace instead of empowered and strengthened? That’s the premise of Marcella Bremer’s new book, “Developing a Positive Culture where People and Performance Thrive,” which is about helping organizations become much more effective “positive cultures.” Every working person needs to hear this!

I have had the pleasure of working with Marcella Bremer and her organization, the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (www.ocai-online.com ), originally developed by Drs. Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn at the University of Michigan. Marcella has the license for the OCAI and has made it available across the globe for companies to diagnose and change their cultures. As culture change experts, the OCAI is something we at SAMC use quite frequently with our clients

An author, consultant, trainer and great thinker, Marcella helps companies build more positive, powerful cultures in which people can work. Positive organizations are better at change, more innovative, more competitive, more profitable, and contribute more to the world. In a positive organizational environment, people can thrive at work.

Marcella understood this when she formed her company, OCAI Online. Then she co-founded the Positive Leadership & Change Magazine blog to help people make a difference at work, followed by her first book about organizational culture work. She then explored Positive Organizational Scholarship and started to experiment with how to help others create workplace cultures that made a powerful impact on people and on profits.

That’s the basis of her second book, “Developing a Positive Culture where People and Performance Thrive.” From here, she is building the online Positive Culture Academy where people can learn to apply the book’s tools to their situation.

Four important takeaways:

You can make a difference to the organizational system where you work.
If you influence one person, one interaction at a time, you contribute to a more positive culture.
There is no need to choose between suffer and succeed.
When you thrive, you deliver the best you have to offer and that’s called “positive deviance.” It’s positive for yourself and for the organization.

In this podcast, you’ll learn a lot about:

How managers can learn how to combine pleasure and performance at work
How you cannot change your bosses but you can change the way bosses and their teams work together
How positive organizations become more engaged organizations, more innovative and more productive

Resources so you can learn more: