Are you leading a team with a high Drama Quotient ("DQ")?

Are you working in an office with a high DQ? 

Did you ever wonder approximately what this is costing you and your company? 

You would be surprised. In an average work environment, employees spend 25% (or two hours) of their day on gossip, back-biting, fallout from office politics and conflict. In some environments, it can reach a shocking 50%!

Imagine your operations spending upwards of fifty cents on the dollar feeding your DQ!!! Don’t believe this is possible? It's true, according to the Gallup Organization. Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report put the cost of disengagement in American businesses at between $450 and $550 billion annually!

Does your office have a high DQ? At the end of this article, we’ll tell you how you can move to a foundational infrastructure to virtually eliminate DQ and become a high-performing team.

1. Does your office/department suffer from the “fatal pronoun disease” and rationalize poor performance primarily using words like “he,” “she,” “them,” and “they”?
2. Do your employees tend to “fix the blame” first, not the problem?
3. If an issue were to show itself (a spark) and each of your employees carried two buckets with them (one filled with gasoline, one with water) is it safe to say that the majority would most likely throw gasoline on the spark?
4. Does feedback tend to be met with defensiveness, self-pity, or retaliation rather than change?
5. Do your employees spend more time nit-picking, judging and critiquing each other behind their backs than they do helping one another?
6. Do you struggle with employees whose skills are outdated but they tend to rationalize about the good old days and fail to invest in their own personal development?
7. Do you tolerate habitual under-performers instead of employing the Coach, Coach, Change model?
8. Are your people more invested in being right, rather than improving the work at hand?
9. Do your managers psychologically terminate the employee but forget to tell them they have been terminated?
10. In the last year, has anyone said, "that's not my job" as a response to a request?
11. Do your people make decisions based on how they believe others will respond?
12. Do you feel like there is a significant gap between theory and practice when it comes to personal accountability?
13. Do you spend most your time coaching up a few problem employees while your top performers run on autopilot?
14. Do you believe you are one of the only people who believes we win and lose as a team?
15. Do you spend your morning commute stressed and thinking about how great it would be to work somewhere else?

If you answered Yes to 3 or less questions, you have little to no workplace drama.
If you answered Yes to 4-6 questions, you would have an Average DQ.
If you answered Yes to 7-9 questions, your DQ would be High.
If you answered Yes to 10-12 questions, your DQ would be Abnormally High.
If you answered Yes to 13 or more questions, your DQ would be off the charts — run now!!!

It has been said the difference between the successful person and the unsuccessful person is this, the successful person is in the habit of doing things the unsuccessful person doesn’t do. The three key words are “in the habit.” Bad habits that produce a DQ are unfortunately, easy to get into and difficult to get out of.

At Butler Street, we are big believers that implementing our proprietary approach to The Four Cornerstones of Success — Attitude, Personal Accountability, Perseverance and Habit are essential to eliminating office/department DQ. We begin every single training program with these Four Cornerstones. If leveraged properly, these cornerstones can serve as guiding principles for your organization and interaction by interaction, remove workplace drama. To learn more about how get your leaders leading again and to eliminate DQ by focusing on growth, click on CONTACT and let us know the best way to reach you.