5 Leader-driven Actions to Build a Team’s Culture
A team’s culture is key in making a team successful. It is the leader’s responsibility to ensure the team’s culture leads to success. But how does a leader go about it?
One option is to take whatever culture exists or develops as the team comes together. If the team consists of driven, high-energy individuals, it may be a good approach. But there’s the danger of infighting as those same driven, high-energy individuals buck for recognition and status, something very normal in human beings.
Instead, I know the leader must take proactive steps to build the culture. Here are some steps to take:
- Start with what you have. Make a mental assessment of your team’s and the members’ strengths and weaknesses. The goal is to understand the lay of the land to determine how to build on the strengths, address the weaknesses, and build the team to be more than the sum of the parts. Understand the existing culture if the team has been together for some time and determine how to leverage it or change it, if necessary. Relational and Contextual leadership play major roles here as you get to know them, their strengths, weaknesses, what can they do well together.
2. Establish a clear, strong vision, mission, and goals. There’s nothing worse than a team coming together and not having clarity on what they are supposed to do. A sports’ team mission is to win while growing the capability. Similarly, a business’ team mission is to … Fill in the blank. Why does the team exist and what’s the expected output? Leverage your Personal Leadership to set a Vision for the team.
3. Foster collaboration to encourage cooperation. Your recognition of individual’s actions plays a major role here. While you may have a super star who does a lot on their own, recognizing them without acknowledging the role of the broader team will insert encouragement for others to try to succeed on their own. To be able to do this recognition, you need to know your team. Leverage Relational Leadership, which yields Trust, to get to know them.
- Encourage your team members to get to know each other. Many times it is assumed that people will get to know each other as they work together, but this interaction is not deep enough for team members to know each other and help each other.
- Set shared goals and processes to ensure collaboration. For example, in Commitment-Based Project Management (AKA CBPM or Map Days), individuals have to talk to those other team members who will use their output. This is to ensure that there’s clarity on what is expected as well as the timing. It’s amazing to me that most project management tools ignore this very important need. Then, it is not surprising that there are issues when team members deliver something that is not what was expected. By the way, it is a mutual responsibility between the owner and the user of the item. See “Planning with Map Days” for more details.
4. Set clear result expectations . Expect the team, as a whole, to deliver to the mission and goals. But don’t just leave it to the final goal. Set intermediate goals. Use the deliverables derived during Map Days as milestones to measure progress. A tracking on Performance Against Commitments (PAS), something that the CBPM spreadsheet does automatically, can give you a good metric. As long as the effort is within 10%, the team is making good progress. There are exceptions, such as early or late in the project when 10% may be too small (beginning) or too large (end). Personal, Inspirational, and Supportive leadership are domains of relevance here.
5. Encourage innovation and growth. In most teams knowledge is key. But not growing is a recipe for stagnating and atrophying. Encourage your team members to grow in their skills and share it with the rest of the team. Set aside time in staff meetings for quick updates on what team members are learning about. Make space for the team to take risks and try new things and/or new approaches. Make it safe for the team to take risks (Supportive Leadership). That’s how I started using Agile before it was called that Agile. I knew that the traditional waterfall method was not going to work for our client. I took the risk and protected my team. Remember, if someone tries something risky and, in spite of their best efforts, it fails, if you react negatively, you will not see any more risk taking.
Bonus step: Recognize your team’s successes. Everyone wants to be recognized. This does not have to be anything fancy or monetary. When I led the program to develop the IT capabilities for a SaaS product, I designed, printed, and framed recognition certificates for every member. It was amazing the reaction to this recognition.
Another bonus: remember Tuckman’s Model of group development. Take a look at my “Helping a ‘Storming’ Team” for insights.
I’ve published a number of stories on the Six Domains of Leadership (Personal, Relational, Contextual, Inspirational, Supportive, Responsible) in medium. Search my stories for Six Domains of Leadership.
I’ve also published stories on planning, CBPM, etc.
Interested in more of my Medium stories? Visit https://medium.com/@josesolera/subscribe.
