As midlevel leaders, we all have the honor and challenge of trying to build a culture for our teams so that everyone feels comfortable while staying aligned to the overall organizational culture. Culture building is best done with intention – if you don’t plan for and structure your culture, one will still develop. Culture building is a process that takes time to establish and continually nurture.
What isn’t culture building? It is not a one and done event. It is not something that you can completely script. There isn’t a concrete “right or wrong” way to do it. It is not linear. It is not static. It is not set permanently. It is not tops-down. It is not easily defined. It is not straightforward to build.
All that being said, it is something that you can guide and influence with intention. In my many roles, I’ve developed my own process to help build a cultural foundation that then grows and evolves with the broader world, organization, and team. The key broad steps for me:
- Define your team’s underlying values while not in conflict with your organizational values
- Create a broad team mission/vision aligned with those values and your organization’s expectations for your team
- Define and communicate expectations relative to your values and mission/vision
- Model the culture you are designing (from your values, mission/vision)
- Introduce tools and resources to guide behaviors aligned with your culture
- Give and take feedback
- Implement feedback and continuously evolve the culture
All of this doesn’t guarantee a wonderful culture, but it gives you a fighting chance of setting a foundation that will evolve in a positive, productive way. You can plant the seeds as a leader, but the people that you have in your organization have to water and fertilize those seeds so they grow – all while pruning the weeds when they grow, and they will grow.
In addition to setting the foundation, nurturing the culture has another complicating factor more prevalent today than 5 years ago: where is your team? Back in the day most frequently teams were in an office and the biggest hurdle was having folks in offices in different locations. Now teams don’t have nearly as consistent a structure. Sure, some are still on site in a single office. That is the exception however. Most teams are hybrid (spending some time in an office and some remote) or fully remote. And even hybrid teams may be in different offices around the country or world when they do convene in person.
In person, on site teams have significant day to day opportunities to shape the culture building process without specific intention. You can not only be actively hands-on in observing and modeling the culture, but you can easily pull folks together to discuss, debate, or reinforce important notes. You can have physicals reminders and reinforcements of what you expect. You can have one on one informal conversations that created and deepen relationships – which will help shape your culture as your team becomes more connected. You also can be more prone to someone who doesn’t fit the culture “poisoning” those who do by using all the same potential touchpoints I just listed in a negative way.
Conversely, hybrid and remote teams require specific intention to plant cultural seeds and nurture them over time. The biggest risk in this area is much like the risk software companies face for their products: non-consumption. When you have a distributed workforce that spends the majority of their time away from their teammates (not just physically but virtually as well), it is easier for the individuals to not feel truly a part of a team, nor feel immersed in a culture. Therefore, culture building in these environments requires even more intention than with the team gathering daily in the same place.
That intention not only involves the steps above, but creating the communications infrastructure to have the culture take hold and grow. You’ll need to create regular ways and reasons to virtually connect your broader team as a whole, ensure individuals are connecting with other individuals in personal ways, ensure you are connecting with the individuals on your team regularly, and make sure the team is interacting with the broader org to help keep your internal culture aligned with that of the broader company. You’ll need to be thoughtful in mixing work and casual sessions to fertilize relationships and interactions in areas they may not be as obvious.
Additionally, with teams becoming more and more distributed, you’ll need to consider that your team will be consistently more diverse in background, geography, and local culture and must consider that as you design your connection infrastructure. It can be as simple as finding time for the whole team to gather in a video session, when the members are scattered around the globe in different time zones with different hours and different local holidays. Remember, in the hybrid and remote worlds that the break room, bathroom, hallways, and proverbial water cooler are not places that there will be unplanned, impromptu conversation – those will be places employees go alone – so short of replicating that, you’ll need to intentionally design ways to manufacture some of those connections.
This isn’t to say “we must be in the office!” Quite the opposite: we must acknowledge that the world is changing rapidly (for the better in this case) and we need to find ways to replicate the benefits we had from the “old style” of work in this new environment. There isn’t one winning way, but having a strategy around defining your culture, laying a foundation, and overseeing the cultural evolution should give you and your team an above average chance at a positive outcome.
View from the Middle 