Want a Great Organizational Culture? Do These 3 Things

It doesn’t matter what kind of team you are leading, your organizational or team culture is really important for success. If you have a strong team culture, you will get more employee engagement and productivity, and higher performance.

Studies show that companies with strong cultures have improved performance including:

65% increase in share price
4x increase in revenue growth
15% increase in productivity
30% greater client satisfaction
100% increase in unsolicited employee applications

Only 14% of companies have strong cultures. 48% of companies have weak cultures. Building a strong culture can give you a strong competitive advantage.

If talking about team culture makes you feel a little uncomfortable because culture is too “touchy-feely”, you’re not alone. Many leaders are more comfortable discussing financials or strategy. Culture can seem undefined and difficult. Many leaders avoid it for those reasons.

That said, your team culture is critical to your success. When your team culture is strong, you thrive. When your culture is bad or toxic, it can destroy your team.

Is your team culture strong, mediocre or weak? How do you know?

Do you have a step-by-step plan that optimizes your culture and success, or are you just driving blind, settling for whatever culture happens?

If you don’t have a specific plan to maximize your team culture, you’re missing an opportunity to increase your performance and gain a competitive advantage.

Let’s use a three-step approach to help you develop a plan that systematically builds a strong team culture.

The approach we’re going to discuss works with any team—your work team, family team, sports team, church team—any team. This works if you are the owner or CEO of a company or a new manager with three direct reports.

Practicing this approach won’t just help you lead a better team; it will help you become a better leader in every area of your life.

Let’s start with the goal in mind: a high-performance team that drives success.

We know from earlier blogs that the key to success in leadership and life is developing high-trust relationships.

In business, success comes from high-trust relationships with your customers and your team.

If you have high-trust relationships with your customers, they will bring you more business.

If you have high-trust relationships with your team, you will get higher employee engagement, more productivity and higher performance.

The combination of great relationships with your customers and your team gives you a big competitive advantage.

With that in mind, our approach develops a team culture that builds high-trust relationships with your team and customers.

We’ll start by getting a better idea of what team culture is, then go into the Three Steps for building a Great Team Culture:

Core Values
Ethos
Continuous Improvement

Team Culture
Your team culture is how your people work together to get things done. It’s your team’s personality. Your team’s character.

Teams with good cultures have people in high-trust relationships who work well together. They are aligned to the same team goals. They take advantage of their diverse talents to achieve high-performance results. Continuous improvement is built into how they work. They challenge each other to excellence as a team and as individual people. They care about each other.

You need a step-by-step plan to systematically form and maintain a strong team culture.

For most companies, there’s no plan. Team culture is just whatever happens—for better or worse.
Step One: Core Values
Most of us think that there’s only one kind of core value: the set of values posted on the company walls. These are the explicit core values. Explicit, because they are the official, published core values.

Most companies have four or more official core values. Probably less than 10% of the employees can recite them.