On Team Culture
One of the most powerful things in an organization is team culture. Team culture captures team values. Team culture embodies a way of doing things. It is something deeply understood by the team members. It enables a team to run smoothly in environments of stress and competing priorities. It enables a team to weather organizational forces. Team culture is the difference between a group of people who happen to be working together and a team that has a shared mission.
The foundation of team culture is its workflows. When the manager of a team takes the time to understand the problems their team faces and is able to work with their team to find systematic ways of addressing these problems, team workflows are born. Workflows that solve problems are powerful. They express what the team has learned over time. They capture something unique about the team and its staff. They form the infrastructure of team culture.
The workflows of a given team may not be easily transferrable to other teams. One team may thrive under a set of processes, while another may choke on them. Workflows ensure consistent execution, but they only work because they fit the needs and talents of that group. For instance, some steps may not need to be explicitly called out if the team is naturally good at them; others may need to be expressed in detail if the team is weak there.
Team culture can survive without the team leader. The stronger the culture, the longer it will be able to last. When a succession plan is in place that taps current members of the team to be its future managers, the team culture can continue indefinitely.
In some cases, a team’s culture is so strong that it cannot be changed without breaking the team apart. If the team’s culture runs counter to the organization’s overall mission or has drifted away from it, then the best course of action may be to reinvent the team — or destroy it. More on this in our next post.
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