SHAPING THE CULTURE OF YOUR TEAM

Posted January 30, 2017

The beginning of the year is a good time to reflect on the culture of your team and where they are placed in terms of performance, engagement and commitment. It is an opportunity to consider if there are changes you can make to your leadership style to positively influence your team.

Whilst there is a lot of discussion around the word ‘culture’ and it seems like a complex and intangible concept, organisational culture is really just ‘the way we do things around here’.

This refers to both the positive, unifying elements that brings people together to work towards a common goal; as well as those that lead to poor behaviours and outcomes because certain standards and norms are accepted at all levels.

Examples include organisational practices encouraging leaders to compete for resources and artificially inflate figures through the budgeting process; or issuing reactive requests for blanket 10% headcount reductions without thinking through the impact on stakeholders (including customers). Compare this with organisations where leaders actively share client information and work together collaboratively across divisions to provide a more professional, joined-up client experience and a better company outcome through higher sales and referrals with a better market reputation than their competitors.

There are a number of measures and indicators you can use to check the health of your culture.

Firstly, tracking quantitative data, usually lag indicators, such as

turnover rates
absenteeism and the number of workforce relations cases
engagement survey results – how many responded and with what
customer satisfaction scores (internal and external)
exit surveys

Organisations spend a lot of time and effort collecting, analysing and reporting on this data and communicating the results and developing action plans. Often they also form performance and reward measures for leaders.

Secondly, the real answers for truly impactful action are often in the qualitative data collected informally face to face or anecdotally, as well as in engagement and exit surveys, and can provide the opportunity to proactively prevent and resolve issues before they lead to outcomes such as turnover.

As a leader, you have the opportunity to collect this on a regular basis over coffee, during your scheduled 1:1s or dropping by their desk. What would your team say about working in your organisation, your team, for you? What keeps them there, do they feel valued and that they truly contribute to organisational success? Do they rave about their workplace to their friends?

Hearing what’s on your people’s minds and proactively seeking feedback and input helps you find, develop and maintain your ‘secret sauce’ which can be a source of competitive advantage both in terms of the bottom line but also for employer branding (attracting ‘top talent’).

The simplicity and the challenge is that culture is different for every firm. It is rarely about the ubiquitous ping pong table, free beer, unlimited leave policies and fruit bowl but rather what those things symbolise and whether they are inclusively offered with authentic purpose or provided as part of a checklist based on a best practice benchmarking exercise or the latest news report.

In my experience, the key to creating and maintaining a great culture is being thoughtful, purposeful, genuine, trustworthy and consistent. This has to be demonstrated cohesively across your verbal and written communications and behaviours along with having supporting organisational structures and processes aligned with philosophically how you want it to feel for people working there.

To illustrate, without thoughtfully designed performance and reward systems, the wrong behaviours can be unintentionally encouraged. For organisations where employee engagement and customer service scores are a large part of KPIs and bonuses, I have heard examples of team leaders (and even up to executive level!) openly encouraging their team to ‘Vote 5 to Stay Alive!’ and thus gaming the system to achieve the performance measures and financial rewards. Publicly at least, the leader appears to have a highly engaged workforce with excellent customer service skills, whilst the reality is that unethical behaviours are occurring which are encouraged by the organisational systems.

Appreciate that you may not personally be in a position to change the performance and reward system or budgeting processes. However, there are lots of things that you can do today to make a difference to your team, which are fully within your control and cost virtually nothing.

Remember that the key is to be considered, engaged, genuine and consistent to make the right impact.

Some suggestions for actions:

Conduct semi-formal monthly 1:1 sessions that are professional development focused rather than task based. I can share a template with you if you would like a starting point (kelly@theacquiregroup.com.au).
Do not reschedule these sessions – keep your commitments! Constantly rescheduling 1:1s sends a strong message as to how important you think your team are and who/what you prioritise over them.
Regularly drop by your team’s desks (or give them a call if they are remote) to check in. Much less formal than a 1:1, it is a great way to show you are a caring leader and you will be surprised what extra business and personal information you learn that you wouldn’t normally have access to
Regular team events and activities eg. Brown bag lunches, monthly breakfast where you invite a leader from another division to discuss their current priorities, quarterly events that the team collaborates on to organise, blue sky brainstorming sessions etc.
Acknowledge and celebrate successes in the team
Regular team updates and be as transparent as you can with sharing the strategy, challenges, forecasts etc.
Don’t constantly sit in your office with the door closed or your open plan desk with headphones in. People are unlikely to approach you with issues, concerns or share a success if you have obvious ‘Do not disturb’ symbols.
Take every opportunity to showcase your team and share credit publicly.

For those of you for whom it doesn’t come naturally to ‘just stop by’ for an impromptu desk chat, I would suggest a few things to find the balance between managing your initial discomfort and engaging with your team:

diarise the activity as it is very easy to keep putting it to the bottom of the to-do list when it’s something you don’t love to do. Make sure it’s not too obvious, otherwise you will undermine the authenticity message
it doesn’t have to be a long chat – just a couple of minutes on a regular basis is all you need (in addition to your monthly 1:1s) to make an enormous difference to morale and trust in the team
prepare 1 or 2 things to say (eg. weekend activities and share feedback or an organisational update) and 1-2 things to ask them.
make it a walk back from a meeting rather than a desk drop-by if that works better for you – the main thing is to do it and listen to them
trust me, it will get easier and feel more natural after the first few times!

Ultimately, being a great leader and enabling a positive culture is about treating others as you would have them treat you. As a leader, it is your responsibility to use this privileged position to apply good judgement, operate with principled motives, take calculated risks to inspire your team and to hold positive assumptions about your people.

Want to start a conversation about culture within your team or business? CLICK HERE