By Amy Townson

I once walked into a client site and discovered that everyone was wearing a full suit – in the middle of a sweltering Pennsylvania summer. Fortunately, I’m a consultant – we’re the MacGyvers of the business world. I quickly grabbed a suit jacket from the car and continued to the client meeting. I didn’t think about what this implied – I conformed to their organizational culture.

We all know what organizational culture is – the values, norms, guiding beliefs, and shared understanding. It’s the unwritten piece, the underlying attitudes, feelings, and assumptions. Culture drives behavior and sets the tone for the team. We all participate in this culture and help to drive conformity.

As leaders, we play a huge role in setting the culture. Whether we realize it or not, every meeting and every interaction is scrutinized. What cultural cues are we sending out? Does your behavior match the tone you want to set?

What Factors Impact Culture?

For better or worse, a strong culture can hugely impact the team. Several factors play into organizational culture:

• The type of work the team does. Some teams rely on innovations and creativity – movie production or new product lines, for example. Other teams focus on legal and regulatory compliance or interacting with rigid government procedures. The work of some teams directly impacts lives – health workers, firefighters, and so on.
• The clients and customers that the team works with. An internal team, such as human resources or IT support, has very different cultural needs than teams working directly with external customers. Do your clients expect a formal approach or something more informal?
• The team members. There’s a huge difference in the personalities of people drawn toward specific career types, and those personalities can impact culture.
• Perhaps most importantly, you as a leader. One of the key roles leaders play is to identify and support the values and behaviors that will best promote the team’s success. What type of culture do you want to share with your team?

What Team Culture Do You Want to Promote?

If you don’t consciously think about your team’s culture, it will happen by accident. That accidental culture may not be what you want or need. Some key questions can help you determine the culture you want to promote.

• What do I value? What does my company value?
• What would make me proud to be part of this team?
• What environment do I most enjoy working in?
• What is my risk tolerance as a leader? What is the company’s risk tolerance?
• What is my management style?
• How do I want to hold people accountable for their work?
• How will the team make decisions?
• How do I want the team to handle conflict and disagreements?
• What type of relationships do I want to build with my team? What relationship do I want team members to build with one another?
• How do I motivate team members?
• How do I recognize, reward, and celebrate my team members’ successes? What successes do I recognize, reward, and celebrate?
• To what extent do I want to promote growth and development?
• What type of work/life balance do I want to promote?

What Does Your Behavior Already Say?

Once you know the type of culture you want to promote, you need to determine if your actions support that. Are you demonstrating the types of behaviors that you want to see from your team members?

I recently observed two leaders whose actions set very different cultures for their teams. Both leaders said they wanted a culture that valued workers, promoted work/life balance, fostered respect, and celebrated achievements. Their behaviors were very different.

• The first leader found that one worker would be out on bereavement leave the next week. What instructions were then given to the floor supervisor? Work that team member extra hard, so productivity didn’t suffer.
• The other leader heard similar news, but the response was very different. That leader assigned someone to order flowers, asked the floor supervisor to do what could be done to shuffle assignments around for the worker, and personally reached out to them to offer condolences and support.

Same intended culture, two very different responses to similar news, and two widely different cultures were promoted. Certainly, this extreme doesn’t happen every day, but do the behaviors you demonstrate support the culture you want?

How Do You Align Behavior to This Culture?

As leaders, we set the example for our team. To promote a specific culture within your team, you first need to align your own behaviors.

Identify the actions that will demonstrate the culture you want. At Momentum, we believe in supporting one another, building up instead of tearing down. We have a variety of employee programs – from wellness to development and learning – to promote this value. One program is an internal cheer board, where anyone can submit a cheer to recognize a colleague. One matching behavior would be submitting cheers to recognize employees.

Once you know what behaviors you would like to see, it’s time to introspect. Do your behaviors match? Do your behaviors support the culture? This month, a full half of the cheers were submitted by our CEO. Her behavior certainly supports this aspect of our culture!

Where you have a mismatch, change your behavior. This is far easier said than done, of course. For example, I say I want to promote work/life balance amongst my team members. I ask them about that with every touchpoint. But they see me responding to emails on the weekends and logging in late in the evening. This is where outside support can help. I have colleagues I can count on to point out where I have a mismatch and encourage me to do better. For example, I frequently schedule emails to send during normal business hours so employees do not feel they should constantly be working.

Ensuring your behaviors align with the culture you want to promote requires constant attention. For my part, it’s always a work in progress. I’m constantly trying to improve. Is this something you struggle with, too? Connect with us on LinkedIn and share your thoughts!

Written by Amy Townson

Amy is a certified project manager with over 20 years of experience and expertise in the health and human services industry, transportation, state government sector, contract management, and project management techniques. She has successfully managed over fifty unique projects and multiple portfolios of projects. In addition, Amy has provided training for state and federal clients on a variety of topics. She has strong facilitation skills with the ability to tailor messages to fit the audience’s experience level and role. Amy is a skilled leader of in-person, virtual, and combination teams.

Like Amy’s work? Check out some of her other blogs – Getting Started with Lean, How and When to Apologize, or Turning Strategy and Vision into an Actionable Plan.