How to Cultivate Culture Intentionally on your Teams

Just as we set goals and deliverables for our products and teams, I believe it is equally important that as leaders and managers we think about what is the culture we want to intentionally cultivate on our team. The culture we want to cultivate might be driven by various factors — what the company needs, what you believe as a leader makes a team successful, the individuals on the team, etc. Also the culture you want to nurture may evolve with time based on the stage of maturity or the problems the team is encountering. Identifying what is the culture you want to help cultivate is a whole post in itself!

What is your role as a manager in cultivating culture?

I believe that determining the culture you want to cultivate is not the sole responsibility of a manager. In fact I think it leads to better results when you do it as a combined effort and involve the team to identify what is the direction we want to head in as a team and why. In the past, I have used a range of techniques to drive these discussions on the team, from using feedback from retrospectives, open brainstorming, structured workshops, etc. The more your team is bought in, the easier it is to drive the change.

What are the tools you have at your disposal?

Once you have identified what is the cultural change you want to cultivate, brainstorm what are the activities or actions which can help your team get there and of those what are the 1–3 items you want to commit to for the upcoming quarter. Different companies use different frameworks for goal setting and accounting for deliverables, the most popular one being OKRs. Use the one your team feels most comfortable or familiar with. Also limit the amount of change you are trying to drive, this allows the team to really focus.

Make it an experiment, for every action you are committing to decide when are you going to start implementing it, and when are you going to measure if you achieved the desired result. It is completely ok to call an experiment failed and move on the next discussed item to try out. And at the end of the quarter do both a quantitative (if possible) and qualitative assessment of whether the team felt like they were able to drive that cultural change they committed to at the beginning of the quarter.

Here are couple of examples:

• Your team wants to foster a culture of innovation. They decide to do monthly hack days to have a creative outlet. At the end of the quarter, they evaluate whether the team generated ideas normally they would not have, did they feel energized by the activity, did they feel like they had the space to participate in the hack day , did any of the ideas make it to production etc.
• Your team wants to cultivate a culture of inclusion. They decided to come up with 2 action items — one to rotate facilitation of team activity hours, second to make meetings more inclusive by publishing agenda before hand, and using a more inclusive facilitation mechanism. They kick off the first action item, and evaluate if it is helping the team or not. Sometimes these discussions crop up organically in retrospectives as well. Sometimes a more formal survey helps evaluate. The team then moves on to the second item to try to make meetings more inclusive. End of quarter, a team inclusion survey is done to evaluate the sentiment on the team.
• You run a platform team which wants to drive best practices in using event driven architecture at the company. They decide to put out monthly blogs on best practices and open up weekly office hours for consultation. End of the quarter, survey the teams to see if these actions helped, and use quantitative measures like did this help reduce the number of incidents related to event driven architecture.

What are some of the common pitfalls while cultivating culture?

Some of the common pitfalls I have encountered are:

• Doing too much at once — The team or you have a lot of good ideas and are excited and want to do all the things! The energy and enthusiasm is great, but focussing on a few things and doing them well is more important. Culture is more of a change in habits or behavior which takes time. Sometimes we revert back to old tendencies and need to be reminded. Keeping the amount of change the brain has to adjust to small, helps the change be more successful.
• Not having any form of measure — Sometimes cultural changes are hard to quantify, but having some form of measurement is important even if it is more of a sentiment evaluation. It helps the team celebrate successes, and learn from the experiments.
• Not wanting to admit failure — Sometimes we get into the trap of adding something as a recurring item on our calendar and forgetting to re-evaluate whether it is actually helpful, or not wanting to admit it. Helping frame each activity the team is going to try as an experiment, helps get in the mindset of its ok to fail and not make this activity permanent.
• Things falling sideways — In the first week the team is enthusiastic and is doing the action the team committed to. The pull requests are getting reviewed within hours and everyone is happy. Two weeks in, the enthusiasm slowly fades, people slowly stop making time for pull requests and the third week the team is back to where it started. Here your role as a manager is to provide the gentle nudges or reminders to the change the team committed to, find advocates within the team who can help as well, and also have open conversations with the team on why it is so, is the activity we committed to not realistic, or is this just a case of it takes time to form new habits etc.

Finally, I would say make sure y’all celebrate as a team that you have been open to change, taken effort and embarked on this journey of cultivating and nurturing your team to be better!