My goal for the last years have been to read at least one book per month. During my free time occupations I picked up more and more responsibility so that I felt the need to learn more about group dynamics and leadership. In the bookshelf of one company that I visited for a meetup I found "The Culture Code - Secrets of highly successful Groups" and got curious. Even for me who doesn't have a formal leadership position it was an interesting read and I can recommend it to you understand and shape the culture in your team.
In "The Culture Code" studies Daniel Coyle the culture of high performing teams like the film creators from
Pixar, the US Navi SEALs and sports teams like the New Zealand rugby team All Blacks to name a few.
In three parts Daniel Coyle reflects on how to shape successful team cultures.
Those parts are: Building safety,
sharing vulnerability and establishing purpose.
Building safety means in short to establish an environment where everybody on the team feels save to take risks,
make mistakes and speak up. This goes hand in hand with sharing vulnerability. This part states an end of the macho
culture instead of pretending to know everything successful leader name their weaknesses, ask for support and in
that way motivate their team members to do so as well. In the last part of the book Daniel Coyle goes deeper into
establishing purpose, a common reason to strengthen the sense of belonging and importance of the common mission.
In each part Coyle explains underlying research and observations of different teams with positive and negative
examples which make the book more tangible to read by seeing the concepts in real life.
Each part is wrapped up with the chapter "Ideas for action" that leaders should consider in the culture establishing
process.
I don't want to go into too much detail and list all ideas for action and instead highlight high level actions that
stick out:
When I was reading through the chapters and learned about examples of successful groups I was wondering how those can be applied in the kind of teams I am working in. I am working with software development for products with data processing and analysis under the hood. In my team we are cross-functional in the way that we have data scientists, data analysis and software developers with different skills who collaborate and cooperate to build a common product. We structure our work using the agile approach of Scrum and the corresponding ceremonies. If you are curious about this, you can have a look on Wikipedia and the code-with-engineering-playbook from Microsoft.
Since a lot of communication in companies is done in meetings, not only talking and expressing is important but also
listening and understanding the others.
In my team we meet every morning and explain what we did the day before, what we plan to do today and if we need
help. It
is not only a way to understand what everybody is doing, but also to ensure that everybody is heard and concerns are
raises.
However practicing active listening becomes even more important for leaders, like product owners that need to
understand the team's concerns and stakeholder's needs and find a way to ensure information flow and initiating
further discussions.
Active listening should also be part of the job descriptions for bosses and managers on any level to understand
employee needs.
One interesting point that Coyle mentioned in his book us that the amount of thank-you's is much higher in
successful groups. How often do you hear appreciation during one day?
For giving feedback there is a dedicated ceremony in the scrum format, the retrospective, where the team reflects
about what worked well, what didn't work and what can be improved.
Here again active listening is a necessary point, but also appreciation
in stating what worked well and honesty to point out what didn't work.
For many teams are retrospectives the only formal feedback session and learning opportunity as a team.
Unfortunately I saw quite often that this session gets strike out quickly or postponed over and over again when there
are many meetings in the calendar. Maybe because not every team member sees the value in retrospective, which is a clear
communication problem or it triggers discomfort thinking about pain points, which should also raise a flag
and the discussion about trust within the team. We will discuss that in the following section.
For working in a team in general vulnerability is an significant factor. We all have different skills and knowledge that we need to combine to build bigger products. That basically means that not everybody can know everything. Being open enough to state that there is a knowledge gap needs trust as a foundation. If there is no trust within the team than there is no courage to be vulnerable. Would you share that you lack of knowledge in a meeting? If yes, congrats! You are most likely surrounded with people that you trust. If not, what could you do to increase trust in your team? What is it that is lacking to feel safe?
The agile way of working that I have seen is by structuring work in iterations which have different names depending who you ask. The most common time intervals I have seen are 12+ weeks for long term, 6 - 8 weeks for mid-term and 1 - 3 weeks for short term planning. The team decides in dedicated planning session what to do to meet stake holders needs. Key factor for success is that the team and stakeholders share the same vision and the team understands the purpose. Beside the team planning sessions there are usually formats to communicate vision and purpose on department or company level as well.
Understanding the team's vision and purpose is just one part of the equation to success. Another crucial part is also to ensure that people feel as members with a direct contribution. Leaders and team members need to ensure that they communicate belonging clues as Coyle calls them. The bottom message of those belonging cues are: We are safe, we are connected, we share a common future. Again part of belonging is about building trust. Did you ever get fired, your department restructured or your company acquired? If that was the case you might understand now why your motivation went down. Your trust contract was broken, there was no or an unclear common future and your belonging to the company was questioned or just disappeared.
That is the extreme end of how to not build successful teams. So let's go on to catch phrases. Do you know a catch phrase of the team you are working with? Two catch phrases from Pixar you will find in the book are:
Now that you know a bit more about team culture, what culture did you experience? How did you contribute? Feel free to reach out by e-mail, I am curious to hear your thoughts and story!
All the best,
Christine