Intentionally Building Team Culture

12 min readJul 25, 2024

Your Leadership Influence on Cultural Development

Culture plays a pivotal role in moderating the relationship between values and behaviour. It defines the repertoire of normative behaviours and acts as a lens through which values are expressed and interpreted.. As the leader of your organisation, nobody’s words and actions are more consequential, nobody more influential in cultivating that culture than you. And yet: that culture doesn’t belong to you. It’s an emergent property of the team, multifaceted, and expressed in the everyday communications, actions, and decisions of the group, often in ways and at times you do not see.

This paradox is core to the challenge of organisational leadership.

Navigating this complexity, you must recognize that your influence is both direct and indirect, shaping the culture through explicit directives as well as implicitly through your participation. Understanding your role in this process, you can find opportunities to be intentional about influencing it. You may find this one of the most powerful tools of leadership at your disposal.

I recognize that the ability to influence the evolution of your team’s culture may feel like an insurmountable opportunity, but for your consideration, I include the following list: some of the ways in which I’ve seen leaders influence their culture, accidentally or otherwise, as well as some suggestions for utilising these as opportunities for positive growth in the team. I hope you find it useful.

Demonstrate and Communicate

To start by stating the obvious, it’s crucial to demonstrate consistency between your words and actions — modeling the behaviour is the best way to underscore its importance. Understand also that your actions as a leader are constantly observed and may shape team culture in ways you might not intend. Consider the example of a leader who challenges ideas in an effort to stimulate creative thinking. Without proper context, this behavior could be misinterpreted by the team as dissatisfaction with their work, or simply a license to be argumentative.

By clearly expressing your intention and rationale, your team can better understand your goals, and give you feedback to help you improve.

Advice: Regular Self-Reflection and Feedback Seeking

Engage in regular self-reflection to examine the alignment between your actions and the values you hold. I suggest using a journal or digital log to note observations about your own behavior and how you see the impacts.
Actively seek feedback about how your actions are perceived. Be specific and clear that you want honest feedback, and prepare yourself in advance to accept critical or negative feedback graciously.
Find a way to speak candidly with peers at other organizations and get their perspectives. One of the best things I ever did for myself was join a CEO roundtable; we’ve been meeting regularly for nearly 20 years now, and I consider the ability to ask advice from people who really know what being CEO is like to be a kind of superpower.

Listen For Cultural Echoes…

The foundational values and practices established by leaders in the early days of an organization resonate deeply, echoing throughout the company’s evolution in ways that can be both beneficial and challenging.

Consider this scenario: a tech startup initially thrives with a team of versatile generalists adept at “just jumping in and getting it done.” This ability to rapidly solve problems becomes a cultural asset, enhancing responsiveness and focus, critical during the nascent stages of the company. As the company grows, this ‘get it done’ ethos continues to influence the organizational culture, often manifesting as a drive towards innovation and agility.

However, as the company enters new phases of its life, this same ethos can start to present challenges. The emphasis on quick fixes and rapid execution may lead to a neglect of thorough planning, delegation, and necessary procedural documentation. What was once an asset can become a liability, manifesting as a reluctance to consult subject matter experts or to adhere to newly established procedures that are crucial for scaling operations effectively.

Early practices can continue to influence organizational culture as reflexive behavior — sometimes beneficially, and sometimes beyond their initial utility. To manage these echoes effectively, leaders must not only recognize the persistence of these cultural traits but also actively guide their evolution to align with the organization’s growing complexity and scale.

Advice: Feed the Right Wolf

Conduct Regular Cultural Assessments: periodic reviews can help identify which cultural traits are serving the company’s current needs and which are not. Project post-mortems (which I prefer to call post-partums, myself) and one-on-ones are a good place to add a couple of extra questions: what are we (still) doing that is not working as well any more? What unique traits or traditions does the company have that makes you proud?
Reinforcement Through Recognition: Cultivate the positive by recognising it publicly when you find it. This is a good thing to add as an agenda item at the regular all-hands meeting.

…While Letting The Culture Evolve

In many ways, cultural evolution represents the flip side of this same coin. Over time, the culture of an organization naturally and unavoidably evolves. While sometimes this ‘cultural drift’ may negatively impact values you deem important, it can also manifest as a positive adaptation to changing workforce dynamics and business environments. Such positive evolution presents an invaluable opportunity that should not be overlooked. By reinforcing the emergent strengths of your team and nurturing those evolving dynamics, you demonstrate your appreciation for their unique personality and commitment to their growth and development.

An anecdote from my experience: When we founded my last company, my partner and I formed the initial leadership core of the business. We set the direction and engaged trusted individuals to implement our vision, and gave them latitude to organise the work as they saw fit, which they seemed to greatly appreciate. As the company expanded, the team seemed to naturally develop a strong culture of peer leadership (what I’ve come to call “leading from beside”). The team rotated opportunities to lead projects, even including our coop students, who gained valuable lessons in responsibility, accountability, and how to ask for and accept support.

To capitalize on this evolving culture, we introduced a ritual at our monthly all-hands meeting. In a simple yet impactful ceremony, a trophy — often personalized with decorations — was passed from one leader to the next. The outgoing leader would select the next recipient, and highlight the incoming leader’s contributions and qualities in a short speech. This ritual quickly became my personal favourite, and celebrated participants ranging from co-op students to VPs and spanned all departments, symbolizing and reinforcing our commitment to inclusive and distributed leadership.

This cultural shift enriched our company, fostering a pervasive culture of leadership at all levels. It emerged naturally from the character of the team, not through any deliberate management action or program. All we did was lean into it, celebrating what the team did for themselves. It remains one of my fondest memories, and serves as a prime example for me of how leaders can embrace and enhance positive cultural practices that naturally arise, guiding the cultural evolution in a beneficial direction.

Subcultures: Ensuring Diversity is a Strength

The development of departmental subcultures within an organisation, while fostering diversity and bringing a wealth of perspectives to the table, also have the potential to create conflict and divergence from overall strategic goals. This presents a leadership challenge: how to nurture their enriching potential while identifying and addressing potential problems early on before they become disruptive. Leaders must, therefore, be equipped with effective tools and strategies to navigate these waters, ensuring that the diversity within subcultures strengthens rather than undermines the coherence of the company’s culture.

This section is not intended to be the final word on this topic, but hopefully, it will give you a good starting point for developing your own strategies and techniques for managing this tension effectively within your own company.

Action: Observe and Support

Don’t Ignore Small Conflicts and Inconsistencies: Small conflicts or inconsistencies in how policies are communicated or implemented may not pose significant issues on their own, but they do present valuable opportunities to enhance the health of the organisation. Viewing these minor discrepancies as chances to examine and realign departmental values with those of the broader organisation can lead to a more cohesive and robust corporate culture. This approach not only addresses potential misalignments proactively but also reinforces a culture of continuous improvement and unity within the organisation.
Evaluate Communication Flows: Pay attention to the effectiveness of communication between departments. Difficulty in cross-departmental interactions, misunderstandings, or a lack of shared language may signal that subcultures are becoming barriers rather than bridges.
Identify Self-Isolation and Siloing: Watch for signs of departments operating in isolation, where there is little to no cross-collaboration. Increased department-centric language, not shared across others, or projects consistently handled within one department, can be early indicators of siloing.
Sense Resistance to Change: Be aware of how departments react to organisational changes. Persistent resistance from a particular department, especially when changes challenge their established practices, can suggest a deeply ingrained subculture that resists alignment with the organisation’s direction.
Assess Employee Engagement and Satisfaction: Regularly check in on employee satisfaction. Significant variances in engagement or satisfaction levels within departments as compared to between departments might reflect the influence of strong subcultures negatively impacting the overall work environment.

Action: Strategies to Enrich and Integrate Subcultures

Define Core Values: Encourage teams to express the common organisational values in terms that make sense in their own vernacular. Accountability might be important value shared between both Admin and Engineering, but they’re likely to use different examples to explain the concept. This localisation of language helps maintain a coherent culture across the organisation while allowing the subcultures to express these values in ways that are most relevant to their specific contexts.

Facilitate Cross-Departmental Projects: Encourage collaboration through cross-departmental projects and teams. This not only breaks down silos but also allows different subcultures to learn from each other, fostering a more integrated organisational culture.
Regular Communication: Implement regular communication channels and meetings where different departments can share their successes, challenges, and practices with each other. This transparency helps to build a mutual understanding and appreciation of diverse subcultural contributions.
Leadership Training and Development: Train leaders to recognize and appreciate the unique aspects of their department’s su bculture while guiding them to align with the broader organisational goals. Leaders play a crucial role in mediating between individual departmental needs and the organisation’s strategic objectives.

Celebrate Diversity: Actively celebrate the diversity within subcultures as a source of innovation and competitive advantage. Recognition programs that highlight how specific subcultural attributes contribute to the organisation’s success can enhance a sense of belonging and value among employees.
Feedback Mechanisms: Establish robust feedback mechanisms that allow employees to voice how subcultural dynamics affect their work and satisfaction. 360-degree feedback systems, anonymous surveys, and third-party managed processes can be effective at producing useful/actionable results. When feedback, especially critical feedback, is received, conducting follow-up interviews can help understand the context and specifics better. This helps in distinguishing constructive criticism from less constructive commentary.

By acknowledging and strategically managing subcultures, organisations can harness their potential to enrich the workplace, enhance employee engagement, and drive unified efforts towards common goals.

Create Feedback Loops, Not Echo Chambers

Leaders rely on feedback to understand and shape the organisational culture, but this feedback can often be both a reflection and a reinforcement of existing cultural dynamics. This can inadvertently create loops that obscure or hide nuances, complicating leaders’ understanding of the culture. For example, if a culture highly values harmony and avoids conflict, employees might refrain from providing honest feedback that could be perceived as critical or negative. This avoidance can lead to a feedback loop where only positive outcomes are reported, masking underlying issues and preventing meaningful cultural assessments and interventions. Similarly, in highly hierarchical organisations, lower-level employees might feel intimidated or disinclined to offer feedback that contradicts the views of higher-ups, leading to an echo chamber effect where only certain perspectives are heard and reinforced. You need some strategies to find new ways to listen.

Action: Develop New Ways to Listen

Anonymous Feedback Channels: Encourage open and honest communication by providing anonymous feedback mechanisms. This can help surface issues that employees might be hesitant to share openly. This could be a physical or digital “suggestion box”, or a regular survey that goes out to guage the health of the organisation more continuously.
Change the invite list to change the dynamics: It’s not just that the same people are the ones speaking with you, it’s also that it’s the same groupings of people speaking with each other. Change things up. Invite a random sampling of people from different areas of the company. Get together at a time or a place you don’t normally meet, to get people out of the regular habits of communication with you and gain some new insights.

Bring in a fresh set of eyes: An external consultant is one option, for sure, and depending on what you’re dealing with, you may value the specialised expertise. Maybe, though, you just need a fresh set of eyes. How about asking a colleague you trust from another context, like a CEO meetup or Alumni group to sit in on a lunch meeting?
Encouragement of Constructive Dissent: Best for last. Cultivate a culture where constructive dissent is valued. Train managers to encourage and handle disagreement positively, ensuring that differing opinions are seen as opportunities for learning rather than threats. This will be among the most valuable things you ever do for your team.

Increase Visibility and Reduce Blind Spots

One of the most challenging aspects of leadership is managing the parts of an organisation that aren’t directly visible or routinely interacted with. Blind spots in organisational visibility can lead to misunderstandings, overlooked issues, and misaligned practices that may negatively impact the company’s overall health and effectiveness. Leaders can adopt several strategies to enhance their visibility into these less observed areas, thereby gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the organisational culture and its dynamics:

Leadership by Walking Around (LBWA): One of my personal favourits, this approach involves just informally walking through different parts of the organisation, engaging in spontaneous conversations. This can provide insights into the mood and culture of various departments and offer a chance to hear concerns or ideas directly from employees.
Innovative Engagement Strategies: To enhance visibility into the less observed parts of the organisation and foster a diverse array of perspectives, leaders can shift the typical conversation dynamics, elevating voices that might not usually be heard and encouraging interactions beyond usual comfort zones:
Reverse Mentoring: This approach pairs senior leaders with junior employees or employees from different functional areas. It flips traditional mentoring roles, allowing leaders to gain fresh insights and perspectives from parts of the organisation they might not frequently interact with.
Cross-Departmental Meetings: By bringing together team members from various departments, these meetings break down silos and facilitate a dialogue across different areas of expertise. They encourage the sharing of challenges and successes, fostering a better understanding among diverse groups and promoting a cohesive organisational culture.
Skip-Level Meetings: These meetings involve leaders directly interacting with non-managerial staff without their immediate supervisors present. This setup encourages open and honest communication, allowing leaders to hear unfiltered feedback and unique insights from the grassroots level of the company.

By integrating some of these approaches, you may find that in addition to gaining valuable new perspectives, you are also encouraging a culture where diverse thoughts are valued and explored. Such interactions may help other leaders to also step outside their usual advisory circles and engage with the wider organisation in meaningful ways. This helps in identifying and addressing blind spots and builds a more inclusive and adaptable organisational culture.

Conclusion

Building a flourishing culture demands a great deal of us as leaders. We’re called upon to act both as architects and students of the cultures that emerge from the companies we lead. By approaching this challenge with curiosity and kindness, we can cultivate organisations that are aligned, resilient, and creative.

The world is changing rapidly, and the ability to adapt and thrive hinges on developing this collective strength. Great leadership is now grounded in the ability to guide and influence positive cultural evolution. Embrace this role with enthusiasm and commitment. This is not merely a responsibility — it is our privilege to lead and learn from the cultures we help to create.