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- Building a Winning Culture
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In last week’s post on all things leadership we tried to answer the question, why does culture matter? Reflecting on my time in the Marines, I believe culture matters because:
Strong Culture = Strong Execution
Let’s say I’ve convinced you that building a strong culture will improve your team’s ability to execute and is therefore a good thing. The question then becomes, how do you do it?
I’ve written about culture before, but the more I continue to evolve my thoughts on the matter, the more I believe strong culture is a result of leaders being intentional across two main areas:
Identity
Incentives
Identity
Identity is that idea which probably comes most quickly to mind when leaders think about culture and is most similar to the “Esprit de Corps” I saw firsthand, and we discussed last week, in the Marines.
The concept of “identity” can feel nebulous at times, but when working to cultivate an identity on your team start with the following three items:
Mission
Values
Core Competencies
Mission
Your mission should be the one sentence which captures why your team exists.
Mission Statements of Note
The Red Cross: “To provide compassionate care to victims of disasters.”
Girl Scouts of America: “Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.”
Microsoft: “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
Marine Corps: “United States Marines are a family bound by a single purpose: the protection of our Nation and the advancement of its ideals.”
While these missions are often provided by the broader organization in which you work if one doesn’t exist, make it yourself. If it does, talk about it often and help each individual on your team build a connection to that mission. This is the core of building your team’s identity.
Values
The next pillar in establishing a strong identity for your team is to be clear on your values. A helpful exercise is to ask each of your team members to bring their three most important personal values to your next team meeting.
Spend time as a group discussing why these values are important to each team member. After doing so, transition to establishing the values which you’ll share professionally as a team. You can use the personal values from the early part of the exercise to inform the professional values of your team.
Again, be sure to reference these values often and when new team members join talk to them about why your team has these values and how they impact the way you do your work.
Core Competencies
No team will have a strong identity if they don’t know what it looks like to be world class. Study the top performers on your team and document what they do uniquely well. From this list create a set of shared core competencies which clearly explain the minimum level of proficiency needed in order to be a member of your team.
Be clear on those core competencies which are likely to drive the most outsized impact for the performance of every team member so they are clear on what they need to work on in order to become world class at what they do.
Core competencies represent the standards you hold your team to. The stronger and more unique you make them the more successful your team will be. This success reinforces your team’s identity.
Incentives
Like identity, structuring the incentives for your team to reinforce a strong culture should happen across the following three pillars:
Compensation
Recognition
Mobility
Compensation
While some organizations, like the Marine Corps, are so mission driven that the primary motivation for joining them is not to make money. Outside of those organizations, and perhaps I’m biased from a career primarily spent in sales, there is no quicker way to ruin the culture of a team than to mess with that team’s compensation.
At the end of the day, most professionals work in their careers as a means of providing for their loved ones and themselves. There is no more pure human emotion than to protect and provide for your loved ones and yourself. Therefore, if someone messes with your compensation they are interfering with your ability to protect and provide.
Don’t do that.
Compensation plans should be merit / performance based, clearly documented, and simple to understand. As leaders our job is to remove as much complexity from compensation plans as possible in order to allow our team to clearly understand what they need to do in order to earn.
Recognition
I’ve used the quote in this newsletter before, but Napoleon famously said, “If you give me enough medals I’ll win you any war.”
Le Petit Caporal was, as usual, spot on in his assessment. Whatever the reason, human beings are motivated by recognition which extends beyond just monetary. While the mileage of this motivation may vary depending on each individual finding clear ways to celebrate and recognize standout individual performance in front of a team member’s peers is a powerful way to build and reinforce your culture.
As with compensation, this recognition should be merit based and unbiased. Where possible, that recognition should also be done in public.
Mobility
The final incentive to be cognizant of when thinking about building a strong culture is mobility. Most high achievers are motivated by progress. Career mobility is a way to demonstrate that progress both to yourself and to others (see recognition above).
At the risk of sounding repetitive, mobility should be unbiased, based on merit, with clear standards for what is required to make it to the next level. Work with your individual team members to understand the role they desire next either in your organization or outside of it then create a plan to help them get there.
I’ve often held that the best leaders aren’t those who only maximize the performance of their team, but also those leaders who help the greatest number of their team members get promoted.
Nothing creates a stronger culture than having a reputation as a leader who leads a winning team, but also helps the members of that team get to the next level.
A parting note
Tomorrow is Memorial Day in the US. For those of you in America, I hope you are able to take the day off and enjoy BBQs and a few laughs with family and friends. As you spend your day in leisure I encourage you to take a moment to remember why Memorial Day exists.
It exists to remember those who gave their lives in the name of our collective freedom. Making that sacrifice not because America is a place void of imperfection, far from it, but because they were committed to the idea of what America can be. A place where future generations of Americans sit in peace under the shade of a tree planted by those who came before them.
To those who gave all they had to plant those trees, thank you.