A need to belong: the impact of team cultures

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Today’s read will take about 9 minutes to read. The clock starts now.

Introduction

Have you ever wondered what makes us be driven towards different things? What captures our attention? Even more, have you ever wondered what makes a video of a cat throwing something off the nightstand go viral? And if something goes viral, where does the curiosity to see it for ourselves and absorb it stem from? During my primary school years I was an avid collector of any form of collectibles I could find: stickers, toys, magazines, you name it. If someone in the classroom started collecting something, I was there to do it, too.

The cognitive reactions triggered in primary school are the same as the ones when we now want to be up to date with anything viral. One of our most natural instincts is triggered: our need to belong. We crave to share the same vision with others, and to work together towards achieving a goal. We find belonging comfortable. It feels like our path is confirmed by others alike. Contemporary brand success is driven by community building, and by having individuals identify with your story, rather than only from product quality. Your backstory is oftentimes more influential than your specifics.

Leading a team means looking after multiple people who come together to achieve a shared goal. Irrelevant to your portfolio, you’re uniting people with fundamentally different points of view, skill sets, various backgrounds and requiring them to work together closely. Your job is to make sure all members of your team contribute to their full potential, making the team as highly effective as possible. But how?

Establishing a culture for your team is the secret to unlocking monumental potential. You switch from being individuals working on projects to being driven peers sharing a common vision. Your culture will be based on personality traits that you can all relate to. As humans, we take pride in being part of the established culture, and use it as motivation and fuel to give our best while working together; you’ll feel like you belong.

Objectives

Subject

The two organisational consultants formerly with McKinsey & Company continue by saying that “without a common commitment, groups perform as individuals; with it, they become a powerful unit of collective performance. This kind of commitment requires a purpose in which team members can believe”.

It’s quintessential to hone a sense of purpose. We enjoy being driven by a mission; by a strong statement that pushes us even on harder days. You can root your peers into identifying with your team by defining your team’s culture.

The development process of the culture needs to be performed with everyone in the team. It should not be just passed from you as a requirement to them, as people will not feel like they can 100% relate to something that has been pushed to them.

In order to define what brings all of you together, and what your focus points are, schedule a meeting with your team. Set the mood for a creative conversation, and explain the final goal to everyone. Harness your conversations around the questions below:

Write down the ideas and draw out themes until you have a coherent mission statement that embodies a common perspective. Then invite the team to endorse it. This statement represents the guiding light you can all use when things get tough, when priorities shift, or when motivation is lacking. Circle back to it, and remember what is your core mission as a group.

Framework

Diversity of thought and perspective is your best bet when developing a high-functioning, high-achieving team; but it doesn’t come without its challenges. Differences breed conflict. Your task as a leader is to make team members’ behaviours more predictable. If you were to look at all of them and have to design a generic template, what set of values or rules should all of them adhere to? Let’s deep dive into how we cand define what it means to be a good team member.

Start by asking your team the following questions:

Do not be afraid of long breaks of silence. You are now asking individuals to dig in their moral images and surface publicly their values. Appreciate every response and feel free to participate in order to drive the conversation towards your image of a team member.

Writing down their answers, you can shape the individual identity of your team. Ideally, everyone can relate to the values that you’ve surfaced, or be willing to work on reaching them with time.

Providing a guideline on how a good team member acts means you won’t have to play the bad cop too often. You’ll also settle some of the social uncertainty that can come with putting different personalities together. Moreover, you’ll have a clear, uniform way of handling difficult interactions such as giving feedback or resolving feedback.

Remember, the rules apply to you, too. Your respect and obedience to the profile created is just as important as the team respecting it. At times, bring the rules back to their attention by motivating your thought process with them. Saying things such as “Sorry for being late to the meeting, I know we should all be punctual. I will make sure this does not happen on the regular for our future meetings” proves to your team that you are serious about sustaining the team culture.

Here is a list of some of the key traits my previous teams found necessary. You can take these in your brainstorming sessions, to use them as a template, if they relate to your own work and work environment:

Final thoughts

In the rush of leading a team, whether it’s new or not, we tend to think of team culture rituals as less important. We think “let’s get to work and think of these minor details later”. In hindsight, the attention you invest at the start in establishing such rules will save you so much trouble later. If your team develops on shaky ground, they will have to always circle back and redefine how they work. Your system to develop the culture will be trial and error which, as the name says, exposes you to mistakes. Compared to process issues, culture problems stem from our identities: the repercussions can be very damaging.

It’s just a few hours that can make or break you team. Today’s teams cannot move forward without having a group identity beautifully shaped by all of its members. Moving from a set of individuals to having a shared purpose stays at the core of successful teams. It’s the glue that will hold all of you together.

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Quality content

The latest years have seen a major increase in remote work. What in the past seemed as an impossible dream has become a normality for many.

From a leadership perspective, building a remote or hybrid team culture is harder. The means of communication have changed, and there’s less natural interactions between people than you would have in an office. How can you mitigate the risks associated with this new style of working, while embracing that this is the contemporary new normal?

Today’s article offers you 6 directions you can take to establish a strong remote or hybrid team culture. I could spend hours talking about the subject, but I’ll leave it for another newsletter 😉 .

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Have a great week ahead!