How To Build A Positive Team Culture

Most leaders agree on the importance of building a positive organizational culture. There’s a growing collection of research on just how powerful positive cultures are for productivity, profitability, engagement, and employee well-being.

But many leaders put their focus in the wrong places when seeking to build that positive culture. They equate well-being or company culture with perks and benefits. So, they try to add cool perks like free food or a gym in the office. Or they create new benefits like flexible work arrangements or wellness programs. And while most employees won’t say no to these new perks, most organizations that add them don’t find they add much to the positivity of the culture.

That’s because positive culture doesn’t come from perks or benefits. It doesn’t flow out from the offices of senior leaders. Positive organizational cultures come from the accumulation of positive team cultures. Most employees’ experience of work is really the experience of working with the teams they serve on. So, teaching team leaders how to build a positive team culture will have the largest impact on creating a positive organizational culture overall.

In this article, we’ll review nine actions team leaders can take to build a positive team culture.

Clarify Objectives

The first action to build a positive team culture is to clarify objectives for the whole team. This might seem like a very basic way to start, but so much of what triggers conflict and disengagement on a team stems from the team working to complete vague tasks in the service of unclear goals. Clarifying the team’s goals, its plan of action, and its deadlines and deliverables provides the foundation on which a positive team culture can be built. It brings a sense of contribution and importance to each member of the team to know how their work fits in with the team’s purpose and how that fits into the larger organizational mission. And it provides accountability to the team that’s difficult to enforce without that level of clarity.

Outline Expectations

Another action to build a positive team culture is to outline expectations clearly. People need to know what is expected of them in terms of their work, but outlining expectations goes a step further — it clarifies what a completed objective looks like so the team knows when they’ve achieved it. Beyond task expectations, this also means outlining behavioral expectations, particularly around interpersonal communication and collaboration. Many times, the relationships between teammates get strained because of taken-for-granted assumptions. Clarifying how the team will interact — even going so far as specifying which communication medium to use for which type of topic — can eliminate assumptions and significantly improve how the team functions together.

Foster Connections

The next action to build a positive team culture is to foster connections between teammates. This isn’t about making sure everyone knows each other’s name, or assigned roles, or even personality types. Research suggests that when people report having friends at work, they’re more engaged, more productive, and more innovative. In addition, fostering social connections reinforces a team mentality. When people connect with and care for others authentically, they are much more likely to put the needs of the team over their own ambitions, and much less likely to act in selfish or self-serving ways that degrade the culture of the team.

One way that leaders can foster social connections is by taking advantage of “unstructured” times the team is together but not focused on work. This could be dedicated times like shared meals or activities, but often the first few moments of a meeting (or last few moments depending on the team) work just as well to create space for people to talk about their lives outside of work and connect with others on a more meaningful level.

A useful technique here is to look for what researchers call uncommon commonalities — things individual teammates share that are unusual or specific. These are the seeds of genuine friendships, and people with real friends on their team are far more committed and engaged with the whole team.

Include All

Building a positive team culture also requires deliberate inclusion. One of the more consistent findings in organizational psychology is that high-performing teams with great cultures are marked by conversational turn-taking — ensuring everyone on the team is heard. Inclusion is vital for obvious and less obvious reasons. It’s obvious because who wants to be part of a team that ignores them? But less obviously, being deliberate about hearing from everyone opens up a diversity of ideas and possible solutions, making it more likely the team finds new and better ways of achieving its goals. Without that diversity, teams can get stale and performance can start to slide.

Show Empathy

The second action to build a positive team culture is to show empathy. Empathy is key for a team to collaborate and communicate well. Research from Jane Dutton at the University of Michigan showed that leaders who empathize with their people build a sense of individual and teamwide resilience. It is inevitable that teams will face tough times. Projects come in over budget, past deadlines, and sometimes not at all. And when that happens, the culture of the team will make the difference between resilience and resentment.

“Empathy and clear, candid communication are foundational for teams that guide people through stressful recoveries,” notes the team at CGH Injury Lawyers, Colorado personal injury attorneys.

“When colleagues listen first and respond with practical help, they create trust—inside the team and with those they serve.”

And it’s the leader’s role to go first in showing empathy. Leaders must demonstrate empathy and take the time to understand and show consideration for the uniqueness of individual team members. If done well, that sets the tone for the rest of the team to mimic that behavior and build empathy across the entire team.

Offer Help

The third action to build a positive team culture is to offer help—and create a community of help on the team. Teams that go out of their way to provide help and support to each other are not just more positive, they’re more productive. But researcher Heidi Grant has found that people at work are slow to ask for help. They assume either that others can see their needs and aren’t helping or that if they did ask for help, they would be rejected.

This suggests that leaders can increase the level of helpfulness on a team on two important ways. First, by looking for setbacks or roadblocks in people’s work as they’re discussing it—asking questions like “what’s blocking your progress?” can help team members better communicate needs. Second, by being vocal about providing help. If teams see leaders pitching in to help often, they’re much more likely to turn helping into the norm on the team. And research suggests that when leaders are seen as more self-sacrificing, the team becomes more committed to each other.

Recognize Good

Leaders should also make a point to recognize good behaviors when they see them. As a leader, one rule of thumb you can count on is that you’ll get more of the behaviors that you celebrate. So, when teammates demonstrate civility in dialogue or inclusion in discussion, celebrate their positive interactions. When teammates go above and beyond, praise it. Teams with great cultures (and great performance) praise and appreciate each other more than standard teams. It’s a habit for them. And that habit of praise starts with leaders who are deliberate and consistent about praising good behavior and good results any time they see it.

Encourage Candor

Positive team cultures aren’t defined by constant consensus, they’re marked by candor and respectful conflict. Positive teams seek to constantly improve their performance and individual skills, and that doesn’t happen without frank discussions about lessons learned and changes needed. Amy Edmondson at Harvard University has spent her career proving that teams with candor and psychological safety perform better than just about any other team.

And leaders play an important role in building psychological safety and encouraging candor. Leaders are best positioned to create the space for discussion and to model the vulnerability needed for true candor. How leaders respond to “crazy” ideas and, perhaps more importantly, how they respond to feedback will determine how safe people feel to speak up.

This is especially important when teammates take the risk of stating disagreement or dissent. Leaders who make sure the dissenter still feels considered, and who respond with civility and engage in a task-focused discussion, continue to build trust. But leaders who dismiss quickly — with lines like “that’ll never work” or “that’s not how we do things” — will find their team’s trust diminished.

So, leaders ought to be upfront about their failures, open about their requests for dissenting opinions, and grateful when those first few teammates take the risk of offering it.

Reinforce Purpose

A final element that distinguishes positive team cultures is a shared sense of purpose. Positive team cultures are ones where teammates feel a sense of purpose, and meetings are imbued with a sense of collective mission. Specifically, they are cultures where everyone on the team knows who is served by their doing a good job — and so they work harder and support each other to do better. This can be difficult for individual teams. Organizations have mission statements or vision statements — but it’s hard to see how a specific team fulfills that mission day to day. Positive team cultures are ones where leaders have taken the time to discuss how the team’s work serves that mission, and who ultimately benefits when that mission is accomplished. It’s not about reciting the mission statement; it’s about recalling why the task at hand matters.

 

These actions put teams well on their way to a more positive culture. But it won’t happen overnight. These are not one-and-done actions, but rather habits of leaders that develop into team norms of behavior. When done consistently, these actions compound and make team culture more positive which compounds and makes the entire organizational culture more positive and shapes it into a place where everyone can do their best work ever.