Another spin on team culture

It's fascinating that the question keeps reemerging: What is team culture and why is it perhaps the most significant invisible force behind team performance, interaction and growth?

Most importantly, the distinction of culture needs to be simple, clear and above all actionable. People will and should lose interest if it's still not clear half way into a bloated slide deck, and if it sounds like building a thriving culture is going to significantly and expensively take us away from work.

One way to understand team culture is as the live landscape of shared thinking and feeling.

This can be the constellation of shared beliefs, stories, expectations, emotions and attitudes. In weak team cultures, there is a shared sense of victimhood, cynicism and deficiency. In strong team cultures, there is a shared sense of agency, confidence and abundance,

What's actually cognitively and affectively shared cannot possibly be commanded, controlled or incentivized. That is why culture devils the large majority of managers who wish it would be otherwise.

For the most part, what's shared is shared through everyday informal and formal conversations. Shifting the culture means shifting the conversations. This is easily learnable, and while we work. It is absurd to think we would have to stop working to shift the conversations we're having anyways and that shape the team culture. We can learn how.

One reason most mergers and acquisitions fail

Most teams in organizations are slow teams. They go into self-doubt and risk-aversion when uncertainty exceeds their threshold. They become more unaligned and unresponsive to change. Mergers and acquisitons are hotbeds of uncertainty. Slow teams get paralyzed in the process.

Organizations that don't know how to make organic growth possible don't know how to help slow teams become well-performing nimble teams. The only way the merger or acquisiton could work is if the participating organizations help teams move from slow to nimble. This takes a complete rethinking of culture. We now know how to make this rethinking possible. 

Stacking the new hire deck: Hiring for culture

Three easy things increase the odds for good hires: agreements alignment, complementary goodness and evidence of growth mindset. This is the power of hiring for culture.

We ask candidates how they feel about the existing posted team agreements. These are the mutually crafted and tested agreements on what matters most  to us as we work together. 

We ask candidates for examples of abilities and qualities they have that are complementary to those on the team. We show them the list of abilities and qualities on the team currently.

We ask candidates what about this work they want to get better at, work on or develop. We show them examples of growing questions on the team.

Our best candidates are aligned, complementary and dedicated to growth. These simple questions separate those who look good on paper and those who will do well with the team.