Culture Shaping Levers

Leading a team is about much more than logistics. It’s about shaping the culture for people to work together in.

Culture at work can be summed up in two things: how people get along and get ahead. (Go read Selfie).

Getting ahead is easy to understand. Being given promotions, pay rises, responsibilities and opportunities are all forms of getting ahead. 

How people get along is quite a broad topic. It includes (but isn’t limited to) how people: talk to each other; decide what’s ok to talk about; work together; decide it’s time to work separately; spend time together when not on the clock; etc, etc, etc.

Taking big gambles. Ok.

You might have noticed a kink here. Getting ahead tends to be individual, getting along is about the group. They can often pull in opposite directions.

Then there’s the other problem that often as a team lead you often have limited control over both. However, you do have the following three levers at your disposal.

Modelling: as we’ve said before, you are the role model. That’s your main culture shaping power. Your team will be watching how you work, how you talk to others and taking their cues from you.

Art: What do people on your team have on their desks? Do you have a team mascot? Or theme song? Any of these tangible or intangible artifacts affect how people think of themselves as part of the team.

Rituals: from status meetings, to project approvals, to feedback sessions. These things tend to take a shape that communicates ‘the way we do things around here’. 

It’s very easy to obsess about the above in special moments, such as when someone is promoted or some other big announcement. And they absolutely matter. But we recommend you have a close look at the ways your team collaborates, communicates and decides on a daily basis. These likely have a much bigger impact on what it feels like to work at your company. 

For example, if you want to foster a culture of focus and attention to detail, it doesn’t make sense to also require people to be multitasking constantly. If you want people who learn and adapt quickly, you shouldn’t be saving up all feedback for annual reviews. And obviously if you want people to have a happy life outside work, don’t celebrate the people who sacrifice their personal lives by working incredibly long hours (in fact, get them some help).

Ask yourself: what kind of person should get ahead in this company? How would they bond with their colleagues? What is the minimum we expect and what is going too far? How’s the way we work helping or hindering them? Are our rituals modelling the behaviour you’d like to see from the team? 

Next we’ll go into more detail on rituals and a few practical tips on how to shape.

Team Lead Standards

The main reason people stay at or leave jobs is their manager. So obviously every company on the planet puts a lot of money and effort into training great team managers. 

Just kidding. No, that’s rarely even on the radar. It falls to people like you, people who go out of their way to read about things like this, to make a difference.

Let’s start from the top: the word manager is bad already. If that’s all you’re aiming to ever be, you can skip the rest of this piece. Leading is much more than managing.

Being a team leader is another job on top of whatever your job is.

It doesn’t matter your background or your industry. As a team leader you’ll need to create a team culture that makes people want to work for you, for each other and for the company. 

We’ll discuss how to create a culture in a future article, but first we’ll put forward what we believe the standards are for team lead to hold themselves accountable to.

Shape yourself to shape other around you.

Responsibility: You understand you are the role model and act accordingly

How do we talk to each other here? Who do we admire? How do we handle pressure? Can we really be ourselves at work? How much, though? Whether people ask these questions out loud or not, they will be observing and absorbing the answer to them from you. All other standards follow from this.

Courage: You don’t run away from difficult conversations

Whether it’s with your own managers, managers of other teams or the people reporting into you. Difficult conversations are a very important part of your job from now on. It’s ok to dislike them, even fear them. It’s not ok to avoid them. 

Consistency: You strive to be predictable

Few things can be worse than an unpredictable team leader. It leaves the team uncertain about how they’re expected to act at key moments. If they’re distracted trying to imagine what you’d like them to do, you have work to do. If your team joke about how well they know what you’ll say or how you’ll react to certain things, take it as a compliment. 

Clarity: You strive to be clear

Clarity goes hand in hand with consistency. Pay very close attention to how the team are reacting to what you communicate and how they put it into practice. Take responsibility for making people understand what you mean, rather than just for communicating it.

Empathy: You take an interest in the people in your team, not just the professionals

We could say that if you want to motivate someone you need to get to know them. And that would be true. But let’s go one step further: life is not worth living if you’re only ever surrounded by acquaintances. Dedicate emotional energy to really pay attention to your team members. Ask ‘how are you’ and mean it. Truly listen to the response. Show you care about people and people will care for each other. And that should be your ultimate goal.

We’ll continue this series going more in-depth into each of these.

Idea Sparring

Collaboration is better when there’s room for confrontation.

It might be my Latin American upbringing, but I trust people more and feel closer to them when we can argue about things. Good arguments though. In good arguments you’re not trying to win, but rather actively trying to make your ideas, your thinking and your delivery better. I even think of that as its own thing, and I call it ‘idea sparring’.

Idea sparring is a part of the creative process where ideas and plans are stress tested, strengthened or abandoned before being submitted to decision. All in a safe environment.

The best teams I’ve worked in or with do this instinctively. They rehearse presentations. People take turns arguing for and against the same idea. They have pitch doctors. They discuss and question themselves. They speak passionately for and against the same ideas, and take in the points that have merit. They get somewhere no individual could have gotten by themselves. It’s amazing. But it can also be hard to do it right.

So I’ll be writing a series of short articles to make you better at idea sparring. This is probably my favourite module I teach as part of The Dojo, and it builds on a course I taught for a few years at Inseec that I called ‘Creating and presenting better arguments’.

Let’s start with the basics.

The three basic ground rules

1) Approach sparring as role play

If you’re the one bringing an idea to be sparred over, it’s easy to feel too attached to the material. That’ll get in the way of you learning as much as you can from the exercise. If you’re the one providing the resistance, or arguing against the idea, you might feel bad about poking holes at your colleague’s work.

For these reasons it’s better if both sides approach idea sparring sessions as role play. Get into character. For the idea owner, play the role of someone who’s less attached to the idea. For the partner (or partners), perform the role of the opponent. Allow yourself to question the idea now the way you believe it will be questioned later.

To learn even more, switch roles. If you came up with the idea, argue against it. Let your partner defend it.

2) Talk like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong

This goes hand-in-hand with the first rule. Whichever role you’re playing, keep switching your mindset. Whichever side you’re playing, show confidence when you speak. But when listening (and ffs, do listen) look for what or how what is being said is right.

It might not be right in content, but perhaps in tone or in principle. It might be right in how it portrays the mindset of your final audience. It might be right in how it reminds you of something only tangentially related that opens up a new idea for you.

3) Agree on the practice

For sparring to be most productive, you’ll do better by briefing your partner on what you’re trying to learn about. First explain these rules, get them to read this piece even.

Then, be clear on what you’re sparring over. Is the whole idea up for questioning? Are you specifically trying to find holes in the execution? Is it more about how you’re presenting it? Or maybe it’s about the specific person you need to convince and you’d like your partner to do their best to represent them?

And as a partner, perform as you’ve been requested to first, holding any other feedback you might have for after the session.

If you want to know more about idea sparring, you can follow me on LinkedIn for this and other subjects. If you want you’d like to know more about The Dojo training for you and your team, including our idea sparring module, just head here.

Thinkers Who Move - Katie Stotter

We’ve created The Dojo to make thinkers healthier, happier and smarter by getting them to move their bodies. There’s tons of data on that. But from our advertising days we know that to really change people’s minds data has to come with good stories.

So we set out to talk to thinkers who already use their physical practice to enhance their minds. This is the first article in a series we call ‘Thinkers Who Move’, where we interview people who embody Full Body Thinking through their practices. We don’t want you to skim read, so these are short, with an intro and then discussion on the key quotes.

Our interviewee is Katie Stotter, Strategy Consulting Lead at & us.

If you have more time, you can listen to the full interview through this link.

So we’re talking to thinkers who already use their physical practice to enhance their minds. We’ve been growing through our conversations with them and hope you will too.

_____________________________

I spoke to Katie just as she was coming back from a week of Swing Dancing competitions, first in Montpellier and then in Leeds. ‘I describe it as a hobby that got completely out of control’, she says of her dancing. Katie found dance after a break up. With all this time she wasn’t using for films in the evening, she wanted to learn new things.

‘I picked things I was bad at: baking and dancing’

Katie promises me her rum brownies are amazing now. Speaking of dance, however, her practice built upon previous pursuits. She understood music as she had been a musician. And her knowledge of how to move came from a decade of martial arts.

There’s quite a bit of research into how learning new skills keeps your brain healthy. I’m always telling people to try learning something hard. But Katie’s approach seems better. Instead of going completely all out, push yourself outside of your comfort zone with a few tethers to what you already know and like.

‘I always liked this idea of project based practice’

On top of that, Katie likes systems. It’s very much how she helps her clients put process around what they need to do. So she felt she could learn more and have more fun approaching dance the same way. Instead of being daunted by the many possible areas of improvement, she’ll pick an area to practice and focus on that for the session. Say her hands. Pick, practice, record, analyse.

She’s even working on a digital tool to remove the tension of choosing what to practice. Like a randomiser. Her next tip was to ‘focus on what you liked’. It’s too easy to beat yourself up about everything you could be doing better. But look at what has improved or what you have to build on.

‘When I hit a slump I try to go back to being a beginner at something’

To me, this sums up Katie’s approach in many ways. For herself, she uses this both in her physical practice and day job. Slump with partnered dancing? Hit solo dancing. Slump at work? Go do something you don’t feel like you need to be good at to start. The mindset of learning something new frees you up to think laterally and you can get out of the slump.

But then there are clients and students too. She says if you’re teaching beginners to dance or senior clients the basics of service design, there are some commonalities. Everyone is a bit self conscious and trying not to look like an idiot. But they can also be energised by the process. Here too the beginner mindset can lower the stakes and open up new areas of conversation.

‘For me, it’s the trombone that does it’

Finally, Katie talked to me about what so many thinkers experience: mental overload. Dancing couldn’t be more different to her day job, so it has become her way of climbing out of that mental overload. For her, when the music comes on it’s when it hits her. ‘Specially when it’s a big, stinky, dirty jazz tune. For me it’s the trombone that does it. And when you got that wailing brass section all you want to do is swing out’.

I love how Katie puts this. I think more people can relate to similar things in their physical practice. It might be putting your hand in a bag of chalk, knotting the belt over your gi, or even pressing play as you start running. These cues that tell our brain to switch gears become almost as enjoyable as the physical activities themselves.

The trombone, though, can’t beat that.  

Listen to the full interview here.