Culture Becomes Real At The Team Level

Culture becomes real at the team level. As Marcus Buckingham wrote, “all work is teamwork.” Teams “help us to see where to focus and what to do.” And, as we all know, people really care about which team they are on at this time period. Furthermore, a good culture is the sum of my personal experiences at work and my personal relationships at work, i.e. whether or not my one to one interactions with members of my team are positive or negative.

As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall wrote in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019): “… what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest is their ability to meet these two categories of needs for the people on their teams. What we, as team members, want from you, our team leader, is firstly that you make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful; and secondly that you make us feel you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals.” They also explain that “… local experiences… are significantly more important than company ones.”

For us here today, we need to remember that local individual experiences create local collective experiences. And local collective experiences influence the understanding of corporate choices at the local level. This is one more thing that defines company culture for most people.

With the above in mind, we need team leaders who can communicate meaning and purpose, not just work, goals and outcomes. We need these same leaders to role model meaning and purpose more than just telling people it is important.  As Buckingham and Goodall note, “Instead of cascading goals, instead of cascading instructions for actions, we should cascade meaning and purpose. It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced. Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism…. Our people don’t need to be told what to do; they want to be told why.”

This week, put meaning and purpose at the center of what you do. Help your team become better prepared for 2023. It is just around the corner.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257