Defining company culture can feel daunting: it’s so important, but it’s rarely articulated. And as a leader, you play a huge role in defining and sustaining the culture of your team. The resources here will support you as you evaluate your team from your new perspective and begin to nurture the kind of team culture you want.
Seeing Culture
Allan Church and Jay Conger’s article, “When You Start A New Job Pay Attention to These 5 Aspects of Company Culture,” addresses new employees seeking to learn an organization’s culture, but as a (new) leader you can look at the same elements to assess what your team (or organization) culture is— and where and how you might want to make some changes. I pulled the following highlights from Church and Conger’s article, but it’s well worth ten minutes to read it yourself.
Relationships: “Observe where and how your colleagues get work done and make decisions. Do they spend much of their time meeting with one another, or do they tend to be at their desks or work from home? Are people friendly and open to meeting with you? Or do they appear to be nice but repeatedly cancel ‘meet and greets’?”
Communication: “When you start a new job, look at how people tend to communicate with one another. Is it through formal channels, like meetings that are always set in advance, and to which everyone comes well-prepared? Or do individuals more often communicate spontaneously with little or no documentation?”
Decision Making: “How companies make decisions also varies in important ways. Some companies make real-time decisions in formal meetings, while others tend to finalize decisions offline. Even if formal meetings are the norm, you may find that the real decisions happen by the coffee station, in the hallway, or over lunch.”
Individual vs Group Perspectives: “Some companies approach work as being largely the product of individuals, while in others it is the product of a collaborative orientation.”
Change Agents: “Another cultural factor that can have a profound impact on your status and influence is the culture’s orientation toward change. Most places are resistant to outsiders bent on change. Typically, though, highly talented leaders brought in from the outside are told to ‘shake things up’ to challenge the status quo.”
Once you’ve made your observations, reflect on what they mean. For example, maybe, under the heading of relationships, you observed that your team gets most of its work done in meetings, but there could be widely different explanations for that practice. Is that because the team is process driven, or is it because the team members don’t trust each other enough to work independently?
Changing Culture
Jordana Valencia’s article, “Scaling Culture for Fast-Growing Companies,” focuses on the pressure fast growth has on sustaining company culture, but her recommendations are valid for a company at any point in its growth cycle. Her first two insights are relevant on a small scale, especially if you have set yourself the task of changing your team’s culture.
Identify the team/organization’s values, and “define each company value or belief into two or three behaviors that people can observe.”
Provide accessible resources for the team to learn the “knowledge, skills, and attitudes … to produce each behavior”
Valencia also emphasizes that “managers [must] relentlessly reinforce target behaviors.” On the more intimate scale of your team, this expectation means that you must “relentlessly reinforce” the values that underpin the culture you are trying to sustain—not only for your team members but for yourself. Employees watch leaders to see if they walk the talk.
Employees’ especially scrutinize their leaders’ commitment to team values when it comes to recognition and appreciation. Mike Robbins, author of “Why Employees Need Recognition and Appreciation,” distinguishes these two: “Recognition is about giving positive feedback based on results or performance. … Appreciation, on the other hand, is about acknowledging a person’s inherent value.” While leaders should always appreciate their employees, their recognition of employees should align with the team/organization’s explicit values and desired culture.
For more about the power of onboarding as a way to shape team/organization culture, return to the Vision and Message resources.