Create a culture
Great teams run on great cultures, the essential values and beliefs that underpin how an organisation delivers and works together
To build a successful team, you must also create a successful culture. Great people, led brilliantly, are essential but they are only the start. For businesses of all sizes you need a strong, clearly articulated and vibrant culture.
As a leader, culture reaches the places you cannot. You can’t be in every meeting, making every decision and on top of every project. Many things will – and must – happen that you will never see or hear about (unless something goes wrong!), so a core part of your leadership journey will be shaping a culture that can help you do your job when you’re not there to do it.
That is something which can be unsettling. Many leaders are personalities who like to have a handle on as much as possible. Yet there is both a benefit and a necessity in letting go. The advantage, as we have discussed, is that you empower your people by trusting them to make decisions and forge their own path. The necessity is simple: beyond a certain size, and in a start-up it happens sooner than you expect, there’ll be too much going on for you to be pulling all the levers yourself. This is where culture becomes a powerful part of your leadership toolkit.
What do we mean by culture? At its simplest, culture is a set of shared beliefs and behavioural expectations that an organisation lives and works by. It’s not a rulebook, but rather a blueprint – both written and unwritten – that people can use to help them work with colleagues, clients and partners. Think of culture as a common agreement across an organisation on how it seeks to behave and act. Stick a fork in any business and culture is what comes out. Every business has a culture, whether it’s good or bad. It’s in the policies, prioritisations and processes you develop, and the behaviours and relationships of the people you hire. Company values are where culture starts, but cannot be where it ends. Written-down values and words on a page are not in themselves culture: they fuel and inspire it, but culture is how those good intentions live and grow within your organisation and among your people.
Next we will talk about how you start to shape a culture and values that can be defining for your team, giving you a sense of shared purpose and a guiding star to follow.
Shaping culture
In recent years, the importance of culture, and of start-up culture in particular, has come to the attention of bigger businesses, who see their own place on the FSTE 100 or Fortune 500 threatened by newer companies, with innovative business models and ambitious, can-do cultures. There are ‘innovation field trips’ to Silicon Valley in California and ‘Tech City’ in London, as leaders at the very top echelons of the world’s most famous brands have the humility, curiosity and foresight look to start-up culture to help them move faster and innovate more. Cultivating a start-up culture – focused on mission and fuelled by empowered employees – is increasingly being seen as a route to building happy, engaged and productive teams, that in turn will deliver better returns for shareholders.
You won’t be surprised when we tell you that culture isn’t something you can introduce overnight or simply click your fingers and order into being. It doesn’t sit on a page and it doesn’t grow according to a plan. Culture is the most organic of forces; something that, like a rare flower, can be cultivated, encouraged and nurtured, but will only grow if the conditions are right for it. So the first thing to understand as a leader trying to shape a culture is you can’t completely control it; no more than a gardener can control the weather. However, what you can do as a stepping up leader is create the right environment for a positive culture to thrive. Here, based on our experience of fostering start-up and scale-up cultures, are some of the key cultural components to consider.
PURPOSEFUL
Companies with purpose are 400 per cent more profitable than their peers. In the team you lead, you need a purpose that is bigger than a bottom line, one that allows your people to be their bravest selves, do work that challenges the status quo and deliver meaningful impact. Purpose allows you to shape a future and an industry that you and your people want to be a part of. You cannot have a successful culture without a defining purpose, so that’s where you need to start.
PEOPLE FIRST
Building a strong culture and nurturing your people first and foremost means you can be confident you’ve got a committed team prepared to tackle the toughest problems. A company’s culture comes to life through its people; they are the custodians of your culture. Every person you recruit to your team will have some impact, big or small, on the overall culture. That means you need to hire with culture in mind, recognise people who best embody the values and be open to the evolution of a culture as the people, size and stage of your team or business change.
OPEN
In times of disruption, an open and transparent culture is more important than ever – you want to know that every member of the team feels comfortable bringing bad news and raising market challenges at an early stage. You also want people who are willing to challenge decisions, and make sure that you have the forums for that to happen. Use all-company Town Halls or regular team meetings to communicate challenges and surface what’s NOT working, and give your people the opportunity to break into smaller groups and discuss so it’s not just a one-way, top-down broadcast. You need all your people to be using their eyes and ears, so foster an open culture that allows good ideas to come from all quarters – some of our best ideas have come from work experience students and interns, but they’ll only share their thoughts if they feel empowered to contribute.
AGILE
Especially in a time of uncertainty, you need your culture to be open to new directions and fundamentally open-minded. If you keep listening, keep learning, keep reading, keep evolving, keep experimenting and keep questioning, you can keep on being at the cutting edge of trends that are reshaping the world we live in. There are so many unknowns and unknown unknowns that it’s important to focus on the things you can control, rather than the things you can’t. Maybe you can’t control what happens in your overall business, but you can have an impact on the team you’re a part of. With so much data available, everyone runs the risk of being paralysed by fear and by needing ‘just one more data point’ before making a decision. The honest truth is that the data points are changing all the time and there’ll always be another reason to delay, so make your personal ethos and your team culture agile enough to get on with the job at hand, even under an onslaught of change.
CURIOUS
If your culture is going to be agile enough to respond to a world of constant change, it also needs to be one that has learning at its core. You want an ethos that has curiosity running through its veins, where your people take every opportunity to learn new skills, soak up new ideas and meet new influencers and industry leaders. The best entrepreneurial cultures aren’t just about creating an environment for people to do their jobs well: they’re about helping them learn about their industry so they end up doing their jobs better.
COLLABORATIVE
In uncertain times, the future can feel like a formidable foe. We all have a better chance of coming out on top if we pool resources and work together to face uncertainty. Within a team that means listening to each other’s opinions and playing to individuals’ strengths. Internally, that can mean cross-functional crack squads working to solve particular pain points or capitalise on product opportunities. Beyond the walls of a company, it means forging more partnerships and strategic alliances. Don’t be a closed circle; always be open to new ideas, new partners and new possibilities.
DIVERSE
It’s a simple rule: the more diverse the team, the better the decision making. The more diverse the company, the more innovative it is. And the more diverse your workforce, the greater revenues you’ll bring in. A recent report from the consultants McKinsey showed that companies in the top quartile for diversity are 35 per cent more likely to have financial returns above the average for their industry. So make your culture one that doesn’t just welcome diversity, but one which also actively champions and facilitates it.
VALUES-CENTRIC
The most important thing for you, as leader, is not even to set the values: it’s to live the values. Values are behaviours not statements. Almost all companies past a certain size have statements of mission, purpose and values. Very few live by them. For values to be real, you have to hire and fire by them, promote and demote by them, start and stop projects based on them. And you have to do that consistently, all the time, for a long time. Only then can you earn the right to talk about values and culture.
Action: Organise a Team Summit or set up a Culture Working Group to start exploring what purpose, collaboration, agility and openness could mean in the context of your team. Along with your colleagues, workshop the following questions:
- What is our mission: the driving central purpose of what we are here to do?
- What do we care about: individually and collectively?
- What are our strengths: the things that make us unique and different?
- What do we do that we love?
- What would we change tomorrow if we could?
- What doesn’t work as well as it should? How might we start to change that?
- What is our biggest single goal for the next three months and the next year?
Use the results to create a culture map for your business, which could include:
- The key things you want to achieve together
- Team strengths
- Commitments you will make to each other and the team
- Expectations you have of people joining the team
Words of wisdom: Bringing out the best in people
Leadership is all about bringing out the best in people and it is not about a big ego. It is better not to think that you are the cleverest person in the room. Instead surround yourself with the best and enable them to perform. That way, you achieve what is good for you and good for them. Confidence is important but if you are too confident, you don’t try harder. A little bit of insecurity keeps you on your toes!
Never think you are the finished article. Be endlessly curious. Be interested in people. Listen with attention. Think about what is going on around you in the world and how it might affect your business. Your empathetic skills will take you a great deal further than your analytical mind or academic qualifications.
‘Turn up on time and follow up’ are wise words to live by in your career – and in life! Be reliable, show up, take action. Your ability to hold someone’s confidence and to be trusted to deliver – and for that to be right – cannot be underestimated in your journey to the top. Decide what you want to achieve in your work and life – rather than see it as a competition to be better or bigger or richer or more adored than the next person. Be purposeful instead. Set your goals by what really matters for you. The journey may be complicated, unexpected stuff happens along the way, but your life will be more interesting!
ROBERT SWANNELL, CHAIRMAN OF MARKS & SPENCER
Step 4: Votes – on a page
Takeaways
- The team is the most important investment you will make as a leader: focus as much of your energy as you can afford into finding, supporting and championing great people.
- The two abiding qualities of great team leaders are courage and kindness. You need the courage not only to take difficult decisions and be responsible for them, but also to put trust in other people and delegate, to accept when you have got it wrong and need to change, and to keep going even when difficulties pile up.
- Invest in your empathy skills, to build strong relationships with your team in a highly competitive market for talent, and equip yourself with a rounded perspective on the team you lead from all levels.
- Develop greater awareness of your own words, body language and tone, and how they are received by others. Recognise that everyone is different and will need to be treated accordingly.
- Work to establish a written and understood culture: a set of values, principles and purpose that guides your team and its people, providing a blueprint for how to work together and do business.
Assignment
Take one day or a half-day to immerse yourself in the everyday work of someone on your team. Sit with them, work with them and understand how the team and company looks from their perspective. What did you learn that you didn’t already know? What would you change as a result?
Read and listen
Books
- Belinda Parmar, The Empathy Era: women, business and the new pathway to profit, Lady Geek Ltd 2014
- General Stanley McChrystal and David Silverman, Team of Teams: new rules of engagement for a complex world, Portfolio Penguin 2014
- Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a leadership fable, John Wiley and Sons 2002
Music
- Beach Boys, Good Vibrations
- Starship, We Built This City
- High School Musical, We’re All in This Together
Up next
Providing clarity through minimum viable planning, organising people and extreme communication
Navigating uncertainty with a flexible mindset and agile approach