Building a Better Workplace Culture

The relationships you foster with your colleagues and mentors have immense impact on how you define your career and view your job satisfaction in the long run. That’s the magic of a strong company and team culture. Hiring bright, enthusiastic and supportive teammates can uplift entire organizations, and make your role feel less like just a job, and more like a fulfilling career. For me, it’s all about being a good human and colleague.

When I think about building teams, I’m often reminded of my first job as a server at a family restaurant in Rhode Island. I had no prior experience in the food service industry at the time, and if my first boss hadn’t recognized my positivity and willingness to learn a new trade, he’d never have hired me to wait tables. While waiting tables wasn’t my dream job, the great people I was around made that job worthwhile - from the owner, to the cooks to the families who came in once a week.

The power of a positive workplace culture is incredibly valuable - from a large tech company like HP to that family restaurant in Rhode Island. When leaders nurture a comfortable culture, the people on your team can grow and thrive. I’ve also discovered that there is never an end to my personal development journey. It’s likely the same for teammates.

Here are three ways I believe leaders can help strengthen workplace dynamics.

Give your people room to grow.

I’m passionate about investing in people. The investment that my first boss made in me is something that I’ve sought to pay forward throughout my career. As a leader at HP today, I’m always listening to my team’s interests, their concerns and topics they’d like to explore as they map out their career path. It’s important to give your team the freedom to choose where and how they grow. I’ve learned this from a role where I experienced the opposite. I once worked for a manager who objected strongly to any of my attempts to broaden my work into new topics. “Stay in your lane,” he would tell his team at meetings. It didn’t feel like a lane, though. It felt more like a box.

To me, success is almost always shared, and being a part of the team’s success meant having the freedom to explore beyond the confines of our defined roles and discover opportunities for growth. Leaders need to look at the bigger picture and think about how emerging talent and long-standing employees can continue to build their skills and determine new areas of interest that benefit both their careers and the company’s goals overall. A key takeaway is that your mind becomes what you think consistently.?Think and share positivity.

Engage rather than tell.

Communication is so important at all levels of an organization. The most successful professional relationships I’ve made were built on the themes of strong communication and active listening. From close colleagues I’ve worked with for years, to closing a sale, success is often less a matter of saying the right thing at the right time and more about listening carefully and helping people find the best solution for their problem. This is the approach I instill throughout my team culture and in my personal management style. I encourage my team to talk openly with me and their managers about their career aspirations. Over the last year, a colleague on my staff had been successful in their current role. For both family and career reasons they were looking for both a geographic change, and an opportunity to grow their career with new challenges.?Throughout the journey I homed in on the family aspect and how helping that happen would allow the career change to naturally happen.?You can only imagine my smile when I talked to them while they were packed in the car with family and animals on their way to their new life location and career opportunity.

Build solutions-based mentoring.

It’s important to understand that behind each surface-level ask is a much greater challenge or more important goal that an employee may be communicating. Seek to understand those areas of interest from your team. As a manager or leader, it’s a balancing act of finding new opportunities for your team to grow and ensuring that day-to-day responsibilities are still covered.

If you want to give people room to grow, you need to know where those opportunities for growth and potential pain points lie so you can share the best solutions. That means helping them solve the challenges they face by tapping into their unique strengths and sharing suggestions for deeper learning that can help resolve growing pains. Simply identifying those strengths can help give them a template for solving other challenges as they arise — and helping their teammates do likewise. We don’t control events, but we do control what they mean. Over the years, I’ve discovered the power of asking questions versus making statements. Take the opportunity to truly understand by probing a bit further and you would be amazed by the outcomes. Many times the answers come before the statement.

Building a work environment that emphasizes two-way engagement creates success at both a personal and organizational level. It sets the stage for a rewarding career.