Team Culture Creates Magic Moments
Even though it was a shiny summer day and the sun was burning hot, the carousel of emotions was unique. Adrenaline was still present in the body and the crowd was shouting the winner’s name. The national anthem could be heard in the background and the entire team was in the 7th heaven.
Joy was present all around. The racing team members thanked each other for the victory. These moments are unforgettable and rewarding for the fans, the team and the sponsors. All know that behind these magic moments are thousands of hours of intense work and innovation, anticipating and preparing for all the factors that could have an impact on the road to victory. The team has succeeded once again.
The team culture has a significant impact on team performance.
Let’s explore together a story that inspired me when researching the topic of team culture and then a concept that can help leaders to better understand their team culture and lead change while keeping culture in mind.
“Culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves that we forget are stories.” Linda Smircich
The way we perceive our history, our past events can play an important role in shaping the way we act.
Alex Zanardi, the Italian professional racing driver and para-cyclist, talked in a recent interview about how he managed to move forward after a terrible accident nearly 19 years ago in which he lost both of his legs and how his team achieved high performance both in the racing and in the para-cycling worlds.
“Having the right attitude allowed me to form a team around myself: from technical directors to engineers, from orthopedic technicians, sportive directors to psychotherapists.”
The team has set a clear purpose for their new journey: to adapt their strategy and win races even in the new context of Alex, when he returned to racing 2 years after the accident.
To discover our team culture, we need to reflect on our experiences. Our past events, our beliefs, our practices, our failures, our wins, our rituals influence who we become and enable a deeper understanding of our cultural levels.
Because of the new context, all the team members went through significant change: they had to discover and apply the right technology for being able to race without the leg pedals and also work together in new ways to achieve performance. The involvement of everyone in the team was defining for achieving success. Everyone believed in victory and contributed with their cross-disciplinary expertise for giving Alex the best opportunities to win. The evolved culture of this specific team has enabled progress and then achievement of their vision.
“Culture is a pattern of shared tacit assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid (…).” Edgar Schein
On a closer look, here are some of the team cultural aspects that helped it thrive: mental discipline, remaining positive in critical times, being open to other ways of looking at the world and understanding it through new lenses. Zanardi explained that what helped them pass the hard times after the accident was their ambition and curiosity for learning.
The leader has an important role in portraying and signalling these cultural aspects. For instance, when returning to racing, Alex decided to design his own personal custom-legs that were more fitted with his current needs.
“Culture implies that rituals, values, and behaviors are tied together into a coherent whole, and this pattern or integration is the essence of what we mean by “culture.” Such patterning or integration ultimately derives from the human need to make our environment as sensible and orderly as we can” Edgar Schein
The team has set out to learn about Alex’s medical situation and what new tools can help them achieve performance and effectiveness. When facing the new contexts, everyone had to find new ways of working, discovering together what’s good for them as a team. These discoveries have built upon the patterns that were already helping them perform. The leader has created a safe space for exploring these new approaches, where everybody can truly make their best contribution.
Edgar Schein talks about the three levels of culture: artifacts, adopted beliefs and values and basic underlying assumptions and beliefs.
Artifacts are the ones we see, hear and feel when we meet a group or somebody with an unfamiliar culture. Adopted beliefs and values may or may not be aligned with our behavior and we also have underlying assumptions why we’re doing it in the way we do.
For an external observer it’s really hard to truly understand the dynamics between the adopted values and beliefs and the underlying assumptions of a team because the lack of shared history, shared context and so on. We can only infer, as an exercise, what the interplay of these elements was in Zanardi’s team.
Because of the mix of engineers and medical staff in the racing team, the team might have needed to adopt trust, collaboration, technical excellence and agility as values. Inspired by the leader of the team, they might also have adopted the belief that resilience can weather any storm the team might pass through.
At the underlying assumptions level, given the technical background and passion of the team members, some of the core beliefs might have been that any challenge has a solution (common core belief of engineers), that there’s a first time for anything — e.g. winning a very competitive car race only by using an adapted wheel (common core belief of pioneers), that safety is of utmost importance (core belief possibly generated by their shared history and the accident) and that performance runs through their blood (core belief possibly generated by their shared context of racing).
I believe that we’re all capable of achieving high performance with our teams. Being aware of the team culture is a critical step. Fostering a space where the team can learn from each context and reflect on the shared experience is an action that enables a stronger culture.
When there are lots of uncertainties and emerging new challenges, a strong team culture is many times more helpful than any tool or process. With this in mind, let’s set out to create our own magic moments with our teams.
