Building Team Culture

This is the last blog in this series and is going to work around team culture. Last week, when my dad and I were talking about his work life, he narrated a very interesting incident. He was a leader in the corporate office of a multi-company firm and he was asked to investigate why one of the companies was doing far better than the others. For the sake of clarity, the parent company had three companies, Company A, Company B, and Company C. Some of the best, intelligent, smart people were employed in Company A. However, Company B had relatively average leaders. Company B on the other hand was leading in performance and this seemed like a mystery. A bit of drill down showed that the leaders of Company B had created a culture of collaboration and team work and that led them to far better results. Company A had far higher talent, but team work was low.

One of the most important aspects of creating high performance teams is to have the right work and team culture. This does not mean, you need to create an environment sans constraints. In one of my previous organizations, we created policies centered around the employee. I do remember one of our Managing Directors stating in a forum – We have created Heaven, now the challenge is to create Hunger.

The challenge – very simply put when one is developing the culture is to create that balance between Heaven and Hunger. Managers and Leaders have to be very careful when investing in the right culture. Some of the key aspects to be thought about are:

a.      Collaboration v/s Confrontation. The environment in the organization must facilitate a healthy debate. Employees must be allowed to put in their point of view and leadership must be open to understand and accept disagreement.  As leaders, we must encourage our immediate reports to take the liberty to disagree with us and to appreciate the diversity in thoughts.

This approach has multiple benefits – it allows you to learn new things. The different viewpoints will force you to think in different ways. It encourages out of box thinking and forces interaction. When you lead your team to debate and confront, you create an atmosphere of high performance. It actually forces people to think in depth and make sure that their view point is substantiated with data, logic and experience. It facilitates an environment where your colleagues will be forced to read and respond.

However, this needs to be also handled in caution. The thin line between debate and argument needs to be understood and controlled. As a leader, one must always be aware of team dynamics, of when to step in and take control, of when to allow thoughts to flow. It can also allow endless discussion and as a leader you must bring the discussion to the point of focus.

If done effectively, this will build immense trust and camaraderie within your direct reports and they will start enjoying this with time. It will definitely then cascade down to next levels building a culture of respect for diverse thoughts and openness for different ideas and execution styles.

b.      Celebrate Failures and Successes. Deep down, every human being is afraid of failures. We have been brought up in an environment where successes are always celebrated. Every good news is shared…mails are sent, it is talked about in every all hands, communications designed around it. Intrinsically, we don’t do the same for failures. Failures are hidden, kept under the carpet, if discussed, then in closed rooms and hushed tones. Inadvertently, we create a culture and behavior pattern where people start recognizing that failures are difficult to digest. This slowly leads to a fear of failure across the organization. Fear of failure, eventually means people don’t want to try new things. Fear of failure is the biggest enemy for innovation.

As a principle, learn to stand in front of your team to acknowledge your own failures and make it a point to tell them what you learnt from those failures. Set up panel discussions in some of your coffee corners, with leaders and managers talking about their own individual failures and their team failures – thus letting the organization know that failures will help them grow.

Don’t be Afraid to fail, Be afraid not to try.

c.      Communicate continuously. This was covered in the earlier blog. This is very necessary, because it will align every employee to your mission and goal, it will also help them understand the process of change and transformation and help them see the change. Most important benefit is that each member of your organization will know the impact (s)he is creating.

d.     Have fun. Create a continuous series of fun events. Team bonding happens when colleagues are expending energy doing non-work stuff. But a word of caution here. Choose wisely. Fun should revolve around the culture you want to build. In the last offsite that I did with my leadership team, I had each of my leaders design a fun event. The result was beautiful. We had events that were centered around our priorities with messages coming out in a simple, clear manner. Because gamification was used to amplify the messages already being communicated, the impact was far higher, the connect was far better, the execution after the offsite was much more enhanced. The games enabled very high recall.

In summary, build your team culture around three pillars - Purpose (why do we exist), Pride (why us) and Fun.

As usual, Please send in your feedback. Thanks.