It’s time to take an honest look at your team culture
I have a serious question for you: How is your team culture? Now let me be clear—I don’t want the shiny, polished answer that appears on your website or on your company walls. I want your genuine, authentic answer.
And if my recent conversations with friends and colleagues are anything to go by, the majority of us are in trouble. I’ve heard so many stories lately that sound like they could have been ripped from the headlines of a satirical publication like The Onion—anecdotes about managers stealing credit for their team members’ work, toxic people derailing hardworking team members’ progress, and what I can only describe as petty empire building.
As a transformation coach and consultant, I’m in a unique position. I have the opportunity to work with dozens of teams and hundreds of people, so I get a unique perspective on how drastically team dynamics and culture can vary. And I’d like to share a story that helps illustrate this.
A tale of two team cultures
I started working with two teams at the same time. They both came to me with the same type of problems and desired outcome—they were facing significant changes and needed to adapt their ways of working. Yet, over time, I began to observe some significant differences.
Team A had a foundation of people with a can-do attitude. They were open to feedback. They regularly communicated with each other—even though they were geographically distributed.
Team B had a lot of hubris, a culture of blame, and a tendency to ask others to solve their problems for them. And they rarely collaborated or communicated in digital spaces, despite being geographically distributed.
Of course I’m simplifying this example to protect the innocent (and not so innocent!), and it’s worth noting that neither team was perfect. They were both full of humans and all their complexity. But Team A had a team culture that allowed them to make progress toward their transformation goals. And as you might expect, Team B stayed pretty much where they were when we first started working together, their wheels spinning in the mud without moving forward.
A common mistake: Expecting culture to be effortless
What explains the difference between these two teams—and what does this mean for you? One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to team culture is that leaders expect it to be effortless. They think culture can’t be designed because it’s the lived experience of the people in your team or organisation.
But the truth is more complicated: You can be intentional about what type of behaviour gets tolerated and rewarded. And this can either contrast with or complement your organisation’s stated values and principles.
Organisations are always a complex and messy collection of people. Again, that’s to be expected because they’re made up of humans and we tend to be just that—complex and messy!
But some teams and organisations fare a lot better than others.
Some warning signs to watch out for
At the beginning of this article, I asked you for a genuine assessment of your team culture. Now I invite you to take a look at the following scenarios and consider how many of them describe things happening within your team or organisation:
We do user research or discovery, but we still have to build what the HiPPO wants or stick to a predetermined timeline.
We want to solve the right problem, but we need to go ahead and build something while we have the resources. We have to give the engineers something to do! It doesn’t matter that we’ve not understood what problem we’re solving with this solution or whether it makes sense for our business.
We outwardly celebrate the trailblazing transformation leader, but quietly promote their non-threatening peer who didn’t accomplish anything (but also didn’t create any discomfort by trying to disrupt the way things have always been done).
We promote the loud, pushy person, the personal favourite, or the one with the most social capital—not the one with the most merit.
If any of these scenarios sound familiar, know that you’re not alone. I hear stories like this every day from my friends and colleagues. Plus, if all organisations lived by their company principles and stated values, I’d have a lot less work to do!
A moment of reflection for leaders
Take a moment to consider what behaviours you are promoting with your actions. And in this case, I mean your own actions. I’ve explored this topic here before (you can read more in this article), but the headline is: Transformation doesn’t work if you’re not open to transforming yourself as a leader.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
What is stopping people from doing the right thing or achieving overall goals?
What is the culture around trying something new or adjusting to new learning?
How do you measure speed to learning? But also, what gets in the way of learning and adapting? What norms and behaviours need to shift?
Are there any specific people who are holding folks back?
What gets rewarded in reality vs. documented expectations (skills matrix, job description, capability ladders, first principles, etc.)?
How does the leadership team show up?
Finding a path forward
If the stories and questions I’ve shared here have sparked some deeper reflection about your team culture, you may be wondering what you can do. Here are a few steps to consider:
Get feedback from a wide range of people. Not just quantitative survey results, but the unfiltered stories you’d get from a trusted friend inside the org. Of course, if communication and trust are already issues, this will be particularly challenging. It might help to bring in an external person to help with this, but it’s not a guarantee. You might need to try a few different tactics in order to arrive at an accurate picture of your status quo.
Bring discovery practices within your team/org. Just as you would for your customers, take time to develop curiosity and empathy for your team members. Identify what’s working and where they’re experiencing friction or opportunities for improvement. (If you’re looking for a specific example of this, check out this story from Product Talk about how one Head of People applied discovery to the employee experience at her company).
Lead by example. If you’re in a position to reward and promote others, make sure you’re doing so in a manner that’s aligned with your company’s stated values. If you want to encourage more of a growth mindset and experimentation (and the failure that comes along with it), openly share your work with your team. Tell them what types of experiments you’re running, what you’ve learned, and how you’ve pivoted or adapted as a result.
Finally, be aware that this is often a systemic problem—you might not be able to do it all on your own. You will likely need to enlist help from others, whether it’s an HR/People leader who can help you adopt more of a product mindset to the employee experience, an executive who cares deeply about innovation and retaining top talent, or an external consultant who can identify the issues and guide your team toward healthier, more positive behaviours that unlock your full potential.
If you’d like to discuss any of these topics in more detail or explore how I can help you better understand and improve your team culture, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
