Building Corporate and Team Culture – Leaders’ Perspective

“I witnessed significantly more effective team functioning driven by shifts in the trust quotient, interpersonal relationships, and prioritizing team goals over individual goals.”

Culture can be defined as underlying assumptions, shared values/beliefs, and norms that shape employee mindsets and behaviours. It is the personality of the group. And it is leaders’ responsibility to define, shape and sustain this personality. Peter Drucker famously declared many decades ago that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” During my work experience I have learned that managing corporate culture is critical for business success.

Articulating the culture lies with the company leaders

There are innumerable ways that leaders exert influence on their teams. These translate into opportunities for them to articulate, develop and sustain the desired team/corporate culture.

One of my early experiences of leading cultural change with my sales and marketing team was of slow evolution, taking time to build awareness, and reinforcing correct behaviour. After trial and error, we decided to focus on a few critical behaviour patterns such as open-mindedness for different perspectives, asking for support, and being accepting of the fact that we are okay to make mistakes. Our experience of deploying informal leaders to propagate and support the formal leaders to facilitate the adoption of new behaviours worked wonders. These actions resulted in team members feeling more respected, leading to improved ownership, and enhanced their sense of belonging to the organization.

The challenge of going past personal to team goals

Another challenge that we face as leaders is how to ensure that employees make choices/decisions in line with the defined company culture rather than their personal preferences. It was after many iterations that we were able to conclude that the company culture is better  able to guide employees’ daily decisions when leaders focus on values which employees can easily put into action at crucial times. For example, exhibiting integrity and respect as a value statement was difficult to implement as it stood for a lot of intangible things. Instead values of openness, sharing information, and speaking your mind, were much easier to implement for the employees.

While working with the sales team as a team coach, I emphasised upon similar simple yet profound actionable values, and witnessed significantly more effective functioning by the team. This was chiefly driven by shifts in the trust quotient, building interpersonal relationships, and prioritizing team goals over individual goals.   

Bringing last man forward can have pitfalls

The desire to leave no one behind used to be another value close to my heart. Consequently, I focused on supporting underperforming team members by scheduling many meetings with longer meeting times (including one on ones) to give everyone a sense of progress and to improve their involvement.  However, in this process, the high performers were demotivated as they were spending more time in finding solutions to various issues of their colleagues. Despite best intentions of supporting a strong value system, the chosen actions must be evaluated carefully to avoid unintended outcomes.

It maybe pertinent to mention here that efforts by leaders sometimes do not yield desired outcomes and what we end up with is toxic culture instead of a healthy one. An example, based on my personal experience, of toxicity is when people prove their intelligence by tearing down others instead of using their intelligence to build others up. Another example is when knowledge and expertise are weapons to wield rather than resources to share.  

In conclusion, investing in and managing organization culture is a key responsibility of leaders and determines business success as well as employee fulfilment.  

Author – Mukul Sinha, CFI Coach