Want a Great Organizational Culture? Do These 3 Things

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It doesn’t matter what kind of team you are leading, your organizational or team culture is really important for success. If you have a strong team culture, you will get more employee engagement and productivity, and higher performance.

Studies show that companies with strong cultures have improved performance including:

• 65% increase in share price
• 4x increase in revenue growth
• 15% increase in productivity
• 30% greater client satisfaction
• 100% increase in unsolicited employee applications

Only 14% of companies have strong cultures. 48% of companies have weak cultures. Building a strong culture can give you a strong competitive advantage.

If talking about team culture makes you feel a little uncomfortable because culture is too “touchy-feely”, you’re not alone. Many leaders are more comfortable discussing financials or strategy. Culture can seem undefined and difficult. Many leaders avoid it for those reasons.

That said, your team culture is critical to your success. When your team culture is strong, you thrive. When your culture is bad or toxic, it can destroy your team.

Is your team culture strong, mediocre or weak? How do you know?

Do you have a step-by-step plan that optimizes your culture and success, or are you just driving blind, settling for whatever culture happens?

If you don’t have a specific plan to maximize your team culture, you’re missing an opportunity to increase your performance and gain a competitive advantage.

Let’s use a three-step approach to help you develop a plan that systematically builds a strong team culture.

The approach we’re going to discuss works with any team—your work team, family team, sports team, church team—any team. This works if you are the owner or CEO of a company or a new manager with three direct reports.

Practicing this approach won’t just help you lead a better team; it will help you become a better leader in every area of your life.

Let’s start with the goal in mind: a high-performance team that drives success.

We know from earlier blogs that the key to success in leadership and life is developing high-trust relationships.

In business, success comes from high-trust relationships with your customers and your team.

If you have high-trust relationships with your customers, they will bring you more business.

If you have high-trust relationships with your team, you will get higher employee engagement, more productivity and higher performance.

The combination of great relationships with your customers and your team gives you a big competitive advantage.

With that in mind, our approach develops a team culture that builds high-trust relationships with your team and customers.

We’ll start by getting a better idea of what team culture is, then go into the Three Steps for building a Great Team Culture:

1. Core Values
2. Ethos
3. Continuous Improvement

Team Culture

Your team culture is how your people work together to get things done. It’s your team’s personality. Your team’s character.

Teams with good cultures have people in high-trust relationships who work well together. They are aligned to the same team goals. They take advantage of their diverse talents to achieve high-performance results. Continuous improvement is built into how they work. They challenge each other to excellence as a team and as individual people. They care about each other.

You need a step-by-step plan to systematically form and maintain a strong team culture.

For most companies, there’s no plan. Team culture is just whatever happens—for better or worse.

Step One: Core Values

Most of us think that there’s only one kind of core value: the set of values posted on the company walls. These are the explicit core values. Explicit, because they are the official, published core values.

Most companies have four or more official core values. Probably less than 10% of the employees can recite them. Even fewer employees can give you examples of how they live those values daily.

Underneath, however, every team has implicit core values. The implicit core values are the values and priorities that leadership communicates implicitly through interactions with the team. They are the core values that everyone follows because they know that they are the most important things to those in leadership.

The official core values on the wall might be Integrity, Respect and Accountability, but if you talk with the employees, they might tell you that leadership wants you to cut corners, that leadership allows some managers to demean employees, and that leadership keeps some underperforming employees around because of favoritism.

You can uncover the implicit core values by having a trusted-third party ask employees what employees think is most important to leadership.

In the best teams, the explicit core values match up with the implicit core values. That means leadership is doing what they are telling employees to do.

In the worst cases, the implicit core values communicated by leadership are the opposite of the official core values. The hypocrisy of leadership will destroy trust with the team.

In one case, the five official core values on the wall were good, but few employees knew them. What was different is that the three implicit core values communicated by leadership were even better than the official core values. Everyone knew the implicit values and the implicit values built a strong, high-performing  culture.

That’s a better situation than having conflicting implicit and explicit values, but it’s also a lost opportunity. If that company simply makes the implicit core values the official values, they make the values more powerful and useful. They can take the values and their performance to a whole new level.

Your core values are the foundation for your culture. They are the very heart of your team. Your core values are your promise to customers and your team. They should be posted on the wall, reinforced through action by leadership and intentionally practiced by everyone.

There are three core values that are critical for developing these high trust relationships: Wisdom, Performance and Love.

Wisdom is the combination of your knowledge and skills, plus your character. The more your customers and team trust your knowledge, skills and character, the better your relationships.

Performance is straightforward. You’ve got to be able to perform your role. A basketball player has to make the shot. The salesperson has to close the deal. The CFO has to produce the financials. Managers have to make their numbers. The tech has to be able to fix the problem. The more your customers and team trust your ability to perform, the better your relationship, performance and success.

Finally, the more your customers and team know that you Love them, the better your relationship.

In a future blog, we’ll discuss each of these values in depth and talk about why they are really the only values you need.

Ethos

How do you build the highest trust with customers and team? By practicing what you preach. By walking the talk.

Your ethos is how you practice and live your core values every day.

We all know that you become what you do—what you practice. When you practice something repeatedly, it becomes a habit and eventually a fundamental part of your character. That applies to you as a person and to your team.

Your ethos is simply the set of behaviors you practice to live your core values. It is practicing what you preach. Your ethos is how, every day, you walk the talk.

What’s the best way to develop your team’s ethos?

Have your team organize themselves by role. Get all the receptionists together. All the operations managers. All the sales people. All the techs. The executive team.

Have each group meet and decide what 2-3 specific behaviors they will all do to practice each of the values.

For example, the receptionists at a hospital might decide, together, to live the value of Love by practicing the following behaviors:

1. Make eye contact while greeting people
2. Check in with patients every 8 minutes
3. Don’t point where patients need to go but walk them there.

As the receptionists practice these behaviors, they show the patients that they really do love them. Over time, practicing Love will become a habit ingrained in the receptionists. They will become what they practice and Love will become a fundamental part of their culture.

When each group in your team decides how they will live the core values, they take ownership of those behaviors and values. Their ethos becomes their signature, their brand.

It’s simple. Your culture is what you do. If your team lives your core values by practicing your ethos in everything that is done, your values and ethos will become your culture.

Continuous Improvement

With your values and ethos firmly in place, you can develop training and KPI’s/metrics that ensure your culture plan is working and on track.

Culture isn’t a box you check off and then you’re done. Culture is ongoing, constantly being recreated and refined.

The core values of Wisdom and Performance demand that you strive for continuous improvement in your culture. This three-step approach to intentionally creating your culture gives you the ability to develop KPI’s/metrics to measure your culture and the tools to fine tune it.

Those are the basics.

A strong culture drives results by developing high-trust, high-performance relationships with your customers and team.

Your culture is what you do.

Change your culture by changing what you do.

Make the commitment to Wisdom, Performance and Love, and the ethos by which you will practice them.

Live the ethos, measure the effectiveness and seek continuous improvement.

Your people will become stronger. Your team will become more capable. You will become a better person and leader.

And remember: We’ve been primarily talking about business teams, but this same process applies to any team including athletic teams, church groups, neighborhoods and your family.

More to come on the values of Wisdom, Performance and Love.

Let me know what you think.

I’m Pete Bowen.