Communications of the ACM

How can you make people feel like they are valued and important parts of the team?

Let the Culture Expand
From the Top Down

As leader of the team, you have significant influence over your team’s culture. You can institute policies and procedures that help make your team happy and productive, monitor team successes, and continually improve the team.

Another important part of team culture, however, is helping people feel they are a part of creating it. How can you expand the job of creating a culture to other team members?

Look for opportunities to delegate whenever you can. If a holiday is coming up, maybe you could ask a team member to help organize a team dinner. Look for people with unique perspectives (who maybe aren’t heard from as often as others) and give them a platform to share.

This is where truly great leadership comes from. You establish a culture that enables your team to be the best it can be, and then you allow the team to take that culture and run with it.

How amazing could your team be with just a few adjustments?

How to Create Cultural
Touchpoints Around Your Values

Once you know the value of your team, then you can start building in elements that support its values.

Let’s say you decide that one of the values of your team is peer mentoring; in other words, one of the reasons your team exists is so that its members can do better work by learning from one another. Now, how do you make that happen on your team?

You cannot just say “We learn from each other” during a meeting and make it happen. You have to institute processes that make this a simple part of daily life on your team. Think about which kinds of forums you can set up to help people learn from one another. Do you want to encourage questions in team chat? Set up a code-review process? Establish a cadence of brown bags to share lessons learned? Read whitepapers and discuss them as a group? What makes sense for your team?

Now let’s say that another value of your team is decision-making; your team exists because everyone’s input helps to make smarter decisions about what to work on and how to work on it. We all know that the more people are involved in a decision, the more complicated it becomes to get a clear answer. So, how do you benefit from getting everyone’s input without becoming a team that can get nothing done because no one can agree?

The solution might be to have all decision-making done in the same way. For example, you might institute a format for all reports. That way, the input from various individuals or departments will all come to you in the exact same way, so you can quickly parse the information and make a decision.

Team Structure Becomes
Team Culture

Team culture is not just wearing the same t-shirts at the company picnic. The way you do things every day is what builds your culture.

So, while streamlining the way your team formats their reports might not feel like it has much to do with team culture, it does. It is a way of steering your team to work together, by prioritiz-ing the values that your team supports.

Culture is in the everyday. It is the small actions that you and everyone on your team takes on a daily basis—the way they speak to each other, the way decisions get made, the way they run meetings—that make up your team culture.

I have seen many amazing examples of culture-building throughout my career. Here are just a few more ideas that might inspire you as you build your team culture:

• Weekly demo meetings. Have someone from the team share a recent accomplishment. This could be a big thing, or even something as small as changing a button color on the website. This creates a culture of sharing work so that people feel more collaborative even outside the meeting setting, since they know what other people are working on.

• Teaching slots for every team member. At every team meeting, have people sign up to share something they’ve learned recently or teach something to the team. This is a great way for people who have been to conferences or read interesting books to share that knowledge, and it helps give everyone on the team a voice (even those who don’t normally speak up during meetings).

• Cupcakes for launches. Mark every team win by bringing people together—literally together, around a plate of cupcakes, instead of just via email. This creates a culture of celebration, where people’s successes are noticed and rewarded, and where the whole team celebrates together.

Some of the decisions you make will feel big and some will feel small. But whether it’s as huge as developing an online help tool for your team or as small as sharing cupcakes after a big win, the effect is the same. Culture comes from shared experiences. The what doesn’t matter nearly as much as the why.