❯ Creating a Cohesive Team Culture

LEADING TEAMS

For once, my heart didn't skip a beat. That's a first in five times across four years. A group of peers had asked me to lead a new team. What had previously been naive confidence or quiet terror and skipped heartbeats in these situations was replaced by a new feeling: dogged determination.

For team number six, I had a better idea on how to lead groups. And specifically, how to set an intentional and robust culture.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast—so they say. A strong culture is (somewhat) empirically linked to better outcomes. There's an argument to be made that culture is just strategy at the people level. Nonetheless, culture will be decided regardless of deliberate input. Business or technical solutions are easier to define than solving for a strong culture. People are messy. Complex. But, a solid culture takes a team or organization further than is otherwise possible.

So, what's the basis behind this confidence-inspiring culture system? Academia, brand strategy, and applied leadership. From the archives, I've pulled together timelessly effective findings from Texas A&M, Unilever, Trethewey's and Roux's Spine Model, and personal experience. It's evolved over time into a comprehensive, reinforcing culture system.

I've turned the output into a template. You can find and use that template here.

BIRDS EYE VIEW: REINFORCING, DISTINCTIVE CHARTER

The Team Charter solves for why a team exists, what their intended impact is, and how they operate. It's a map and outline. Each part should ladder up, reinforcing and strengthening the others. We start strategic then get more tactical: ambitions and success measures at the top, followed by more tangible and tactile standards, ending with the principles and practices that make it operational. Why, what, how.

MISSON, VISION, NORTH STAR METRIC

This is the bread and butter of culture. You've likely seen it before. What's the bigger-than-self mission, compelling vision for the future, and key measure of progress? Plenty has been written-on-this already. The big three should work in congruence. A team's mission could be to delight customers when using their product. In this case, a North Star Metric like retention (versus say, customer acquisition cost) should be highly considered to match the mission and vision.

TARGET, VALUES, DIFFERENTIATORS, ARTIFACTS

It's time to turn culture tactile. This section is the team's finger-print. Your team or department will show up differently based on the unique combination of who they serve (target) and their values, differentiators, and artifacts.

The Target is self-explanatory: the identified strategic target is your total addressable market. Think source of volume and right-to-win for this target. The design target personifies the strategic target with key insights and creative inspiration.

Values are the optimal qualities we hope the team lives up to. Each value should help your team win against their mission, vision, and north star metric. Limit it to three to five sticky and meaningful values (who has time to remember more?). For one Crossroads team, we were navigating an unknown path, tasked with wrangling MarTech and understanding our people better. It was a new combination of strategy, analytics, and technology. We took on a value of Expert Pathfinders, providing direction to others through structured exploration of new innovations.

The Differentiator is what makes your team unique compared to the other teams around you. A helpful lens for differentiation is being desirable, distinctive, deliverable, and decisive. Going back to the team above, we sat around others that had dabbled in these spaces already. What made us different? Our relentless focus and ability to execute on scale.

Artifacts are the spice of a team. The fun, even. They are the outward signs that make someone part of a particular group or tribe. For some teams, it could be over-the-ear headphones because they value deep work. Temporary tattoos might be the right thing for a team artifact. We chose a mascot (Octopodes) for a previous team I was on. Whatever it is, the artifacts can (and should) make someone feel that they're included.

PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES

Principles and Practices are the operational backbone. They are the reinforcing rods of the entire system, heuristics that instruct ways of working. It's where culture moves from known to felt. Principles are high-level "rules" for how to operate… People over Process, Decentralized Decisions, or Highly Aligned and Loosely Coupled. The Practices are the methods used to put principles or rules into play. Quarterly Business Reviews might be a method for the Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled Principle.

Take a previous team's Principle of "No Paper Dragons". Meaning, all of our documents should be a reasonable, digestible length. Why did we land on this principle? Lengthy decks weren't effective in our organization's context and didn't serve our team's mission. In Practice, we limited decks to 10 slides and documents to one page (front and back). You can imagine the challenge. Yet, it made us more effective: forcing us to solve specific problems and distill complex information down into manageable chunks.

SHADOW VALUES, ET AL.

For each part of your Charter (mission, values, practices, etc), the leader should spend time thinking through what're the unintended consequence of each choice. Mostly, are you okay with it? If not, can you mitigate it? When we Paper Dragon'd and artificially limited our documents, we lost nuance. Sometimes, people would put links for further explanation in the appendix. In my opinion, a win-win: the main objective remained sharp, those interested could dive deeper, and we looked like experts when we anticipated questions.

HABITUALLY REVISIT

If your newly-created Charter is never visited again, it's a dust-collector instead of a cultural touchstone. Reference, utilize, and edit this document on a regular cadence. For me, I include the team charter as a standing item in our quarterly planning meetings and ask for any edits from the entire team. Kimberly Hicks, former VP at Disney, had a rotating list of employees share what had been inspiring them lately at team meetings. This light weight, high reward exercise reinforced Disney's cultural value of creativity and storytelling.

Snapshot:

Feet fall on Besseggen Ridge. People laugh in Kathmandu. The sun sets across Ruby Beach. They are the mountain top moments of our adventure together, the flames that others see. But the embers, the slow crackling of life, feed the fire.
Laundry and taxes.
Dinner and dishes.
Junk mail and chores.

Give me the embers.

Striving for better,

Justin Pichichero