Why Culture Matters.

While we all have read about the importance of culture as a key to high-performing teams, the intentional creation of a strong and positive team culture is often overlooked. It takes a focused and consistent approach and can feel like a distraction from achieving the business goals at hand. The truth is that culture happens whether we are trying to create it or not – and I’ve learned that as a leader, one will build much higher-performing teams by being intentional from the start.

Data suggests that companies with positive cultures perform better – bringing in higher sales returns than those without healthy cultures. Columbia Business School’s Shiva Rajgopal and a team of scientists asked 1400 CEOs and CFOs from North America companies about culture and performance - 92% said they believed improving their firm’s corporate culture would improve the value of the company. Fortune’s 100 “Best Companies To Work For” annual list is largely based on culture-related questions that employees anonymously report.

Author Carol Dweck in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” discusses the power that a growth mindset can have on individual performance, but it’s also true of teams as well. She found that leaders of companies with a culture that included a focus on growth mindsets viewed their employees as “more innovative, collaborative, and committed to learning and growing.”

I’ve worked in great cultures in which my peers and I were working for the same purpose, helping each other be successful, proliferating communication, building trust, taking a focus on learning, and contributing to high performance. I’ve also worked in cultures in which my peers and I were set up to compete with each other under high pressure and inconsistent treatment, and it created toxicity in the work environment and a lack of trust across the team, which ultimately slowed us all down and put a drag on the business results. 

It’s up to each of us as leaders to create and reinforce a strong and growth-oriented culture. D. D. Warrick published a case study, called “What Leaders Need to Know about Organization Culture” which says, “organizational cultures primarily reflect their leaders. Leaders influence culture through their strategies, practices, values, leadership style, and example.”

It's critical to be intentional and decide what kind of culture you want to create, regardless of where you work and what kind of team you lead. It’s also helpful to invite your leaders to help be part of the culture-creation, bringing them together to define what a great culture looks like.

As for me, transparent communication, ownership/empowerment, focus on top priorities, getting hard things done, and enabling my team to take risks are key traits of the cultures that I’ve been built over the past decade. It’s the culture that I would want to be part of, and it has enabled the teams I lead to accomplish more than they thought was possible, attract great people to the team and have some fun along the way.

IBM’s former CEO, Lou Gerstner said, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game. It is the game.” Your team has a culture – whether it’s one that you’ve had a conscious hand in building or one that accidentally formed. Why not be the kind of culture-builder that you would seek to work for?