Build A Great Team Culture

There are tons of things that new leaders need to do when they go on board. Understanding the culture and making it better is definitely on the list of 90-day plan. Building great culture will help building a great team, and in turn, makes you a better leader. Bad culture disintegrates the team and stops the business to go forward. Failing to pay attention to culture is like taking a huge management debt, and you are fine at the moment, but will pay that debt painfully in the future.

I think here are a few things that new leaders can do to help build a great team culture

Quickly understand the current culture

User every opportunity to understand current culture:

1. General team / company atmosphere: what is encouraged, what is discouraged, what is seen as a good behavior, what is seen as a bad behavior, what behavior is seen as collaborative, what behavior is seen as difficult to work with, what’s the relationship with other teams?
2. Team interaction: do your team members talk to each other very often? are they seem happy with what they are doing? Other than working on projects, do they interact with each other on other situations? Are they quite or are they noise? Is there another layer of hierarchy (formally or informally) inside the team?
3. Deeply understand each of your team member: who is willing to take the lead, who is willing to follow, who is risk-taking, who is risk-averse, what motivates them and what doesn’t?

Figure out the history — how did we get to this point

Many people — new leaders, new employees, current employees transferring to a new department or taking a new job inside the company — fail to do this. You cannot take right actions if you don’t understand why it happens in that way.

1. Spend time with your boss, your peers, and your subordinate to understand the why part.Why they are risk taking or risk averse? Why they don’t talk to each other? Why they don’t speak up when they disagree?
2. Gain trust or likeness. No one is going to talk to you about sensitive or secret stuff if they distrust or dislike you. Being professional is not enough, you have to be trustworthy and likable.

Foster a great culture

Every leader says they have a great team culture, or they are so confidant about the team, blablabla, etc. But it’s easier said than done. Quite often, your team is not motivated, they don’t want to take risk, and they are not collaborative with each other.

Suppose you understand current culture and you realize there are some good things that you want to keep, there are some bad things that you want to improve, and you kind of understand why it is what it is. Now it’s time to build a great culture. I find that the following four things are key to building a great team culture and usually lack of those four things results bad team culture.

Ownership, ownership, ownership! This is THE most important thing to build a great culture. If you don’t give ownership to your team members, you won’t have a good culture. Ownership means you are taking full responsibility for delivering the results. Clear ownership instills a strong sense of accountability into every one. Everyone in your team should own a piece of work/task/projects/products clearly and they know that clearly. You can have supporting roles inside the team, but there should not be a redundancy backup person. A bad practice I see usually happened is the leader assigns two or three people to do the same thing and they don’t know who should take responsibilities. Or there is no concrete task assignment for team members. In this scenario, the team members are treated like firefighter — whenever or wherever there is some task, someone is randomly assigned to do that. You can run the ownership pass test to gauge the ownership: for every project/product, you can clearly pinpoint who is the first to blame when things go sour. As a leader, you should remember, collective responsibility is no responsibility.

Obligation to discontent. You should build a safe environment where everyone can speak up when they disagree. More importantly, you should build a culture that everyone feels it’s their obligation to discontent. How do you do that? Some big things and some small things. some big things: 1) have everyone participated in the discussion, this is particularly important in business/product review meetings or in brainstorm meetings. 2) give enough attention to disagreement or minority options, listen carefully and take their advices if they are right. Otherwise, they will feel nothing changes even if they disagree. 3) don’t make decision first without hearing team member’s opinion. some small things: 1) ask your team members to say something first, then encourage them to participate more actively. for example, as a leader, you can guide the meeting conversation by asking: hey John, how do you think of this idea? next time, you can ask, do you fully agree? next next time, you can ask, what do you think the weakness of this plan. 2) pinpoint and encourage disagreements in the group email even if you decided to take another route.

Pay attention to a trick situation. If some of your team member say to you, I disagree with the plan, but you know, I don’t want to say that in the meeting and I want to tell you afterwards. You have to figure out if that person is playing politics or is lack of courage. Then you can take some actions.

Collaborating. Team members should work together to achieve the common goals. You can ask people to work in groups for some projects and frequently create opportunity for them to work together.

Results oriented. Deliver and have results. It’s not enough to have task assigned. You need to drive your team to deliver those results. If you team members doesn’t deliver, you need to have serious conversations with them. If they don’t care results, either change them or move them.

Great results are the final output you want your team to deliver. But it is not created out of thin air. It needs your team members to firmly own their work, collaborate and challenge each other to move towards the final goals. If you do the first two well, the collaboration will become relatively easy. If you so the first three well, then the fourth one will become easy.