Is your team a high performance/performance team?
The “Culture Hack” refers to a deliberate and strategic effort to change or influence existing cultural norms, values, and practices within an organization or community. Culture hacks are often used to drive positive change and improvements in areas such as productivity, collaboration, innovation, and employee engagement. It could take various forms, including organizational restructuring, implementation of new policies, changes in processes and systems or introduction of new tools and technologies. The goal of a culture hack is to disrupt the status quo and create ways of thinking and working that align with organization`s goals and values.
1: Common Culture
A common culture provides the team with the cohesion and inner common feeling needed for the team to move in a clear and objective direction. This sense of belonging to a particular shared culture within an organization raises the levels of teamwork and collective concern for meeting the goals proposed to employees individually and collectively.
2: Confidence
Throughout the company it is important that there is a climate of trust between the employees themselves and between employees and managers. For this environment of confidence to thrive it is important to answer some questions such as “Which conflicts do typically appear in the team?”, “Which conflicts could eventually appear going forward?”, “Which are the rules we give ourselves to solve each of them?” .
Hacks to Engender Trust
- Ask people to draw one of their weaknesses or recent failures or fears, with no words. It can be a professional thing (something you tend to overlook or a recent failure you learnt from) or a personal aspect. Give them five minutes, and then ask everyone to describe what they drew. It is an exercise of showing vulnerability. There should not be any group discussion about it, only active listening. Otherwise, it might backfire you.
- For this hack to be effective, there needs to be a sense of feeling safe among the team beforehand. You will achieve it through the rituals of this section and as you develop the rest of characteristics of high performance. Also, bear in mind that this hack may not go down well with national cultures were putting vulnerabilities out in the open, in public, is an uncomfortable experience, unless you have already started actions to counter that by using the rituals above. If you manage a multicultural team, take this into account.
- Think of a seemingly “stupid question” you bet very few people know the answer to, or a company mantra that is blindly believed without questioning its roots. Ask who genuinely knows the answer and wants to illustrate it for the team. If nobody volunteers, do it yourself. It is a way to show vulnerability in the form of “I admit I don’t know what it is.”
3: Meaningful and Impactful Work
Over 50% of employees desire meaningful work that drives change, contributes to society, and fulfils their personal and professional purpose, however…nearly half of leaders/managers do not set clear performance expectations for employees.
So, for this is necessary give them what they emotionally need as a team (2 factors):
- The Quest – A series of very impactful achievements team members need to accomplish.
- The Acceptance – That makes them feel as a co-creators or “have fun” on the journey.
Hacks for a Shared Meaningful and Impactful Work
Ask questions that are related to well-being, feelings, and meaningfulness at work. Emphasize the longitudinal aspect and ask, “How meaningful is your work? Have you noticed any changes in the level of meaningfulness since you started in this role?” Throughout the discussion, encourage employees to elaborate on and expand their responses to the questions.
Ask questions that are related to the impact their work is having on stakeholders (internal and/or external ones). Emphasize the longitudinal aspect and ask, “How impactful is your work? Have you noticed any changes in the level of impact since you started in this role?” Throughout the discussion, encourage the employees to elaborate on and expand their responses to the questions. Chances are that “meaningful work” equates to “impactful work” for most people. However, it may not be the case on certain occasions or with certain people. That is why we recommend keeping these two hacks separate.
4: Decentralization of Decision Making
Hacks for Decentralization of Decision Making
Bring current, important decision-making instances in your team meeting from sports, the arts, and other individual interests. Ask team members to identify the decision’s blind spot, possible alternatives and criteria that have not been considered at all. The idea is to strengthen the capability to enhance decision making in the team. For example:
- Analysing the reasons behind the victory or defeat of a sports team or an elite athlete
- Analysing why a painter (or artist, in general) has such a big success.
- Asking them what the key elements were that made those people succeed or fail.
- Asking them if those elements were predictable or not.
- Asking them what we can learn from them when it comes to making decisions.
Suggest an uncharted territory that some of your team members should start exploring. It must be something that represents a breakthrough for the team or the enterprise. Give them total autonomy to produce something out of it. You can ask for volunteers or assign it through a raffle.
5: Relatedness
Relatedness goes beyond socializing roles and objectives – it is about nurturing an environment where jumping into another colleague’s function to help wherever necessary becomes a habit.
A member of a high-performing team never says “that is not my job” when help is needed. When this happens, we can relate and validate how it is the interdependencies in a company process.
To do it as a regular basis, we can ask a team member to investigate a company process, with the objective of sharing it with the team. Highlight people/areas involved in each process step and where your team members participate in the inputs/outputs. It will make the entire team much more aware of the interdependencies with other areas of the enterprise.
Hacks for Nurturing Relatedness
In a meeting where the team is talking about a recent, current, or upcoming activity, ask each member to acquire, in an imaginary way, the role of the person on their left. Have each member write down a sequence of the most-relevant steps that their new (imaginary) role did or will do to perform the activity. Ask them to share it in public, one by one. The real person in charge of the role will make comments each time to qualify. Comments must be respectful and not judging, just explanatory.
Take advantage of a situation in which there is plenty of dissension within your team. Ask them to reflect and take notes of pros and cons, for 10 minutes, in silence, about what they would do if the company/funds were theirs — that is, if the money came from their pockets. Most likely, they will come up with an agreement or reach a compromise, because they will have reflected on the effects and interdependencies of each position. Conversely, if dissension persists, tell your team that you will consider all the pros and cons and will make a decision shortly. Remember that you are paid for making decisions, that your decisions will not please everyone and that you must explain what led you to make such a decision.
6: Seamless Communication
To foster a seamless communication it is important to avoid two main obstacles, which are “authority filter” and the “relevance filter”.
Tackling the Authority Filter
People tend to keep bad news from the leader, because they want to avoid confrontation and assume that the leaders already knows. Our advice is to be open minded, invite direct communication with candor, avoid being defensive and show interest and respect.
Tackling the Relevance Filter
People often make judgements about the relevance of information they have, this includes think its self-evident / obvious and underestimate the significance to others.
Have people share the most relevant upcoming things each one will dedicate their time to from now until the next team meeting, highlighting where they need support specifically.
Conduct ‘post-mortems’ to collectively look at examples where seemingly irrelevant information withheld caused issues.
Hacks for Fostering Seamless Communication
After having communicated a sensitive or impactful topic like a reorganization, a change in management, a new strategic objective or an update on a project/product that is not progressing well, tell your collaborators that you will leave the room for 10 minutes. Ask them to talk about one or two unpleasant questions during that time (rumours or fundamental doubts) that they didn’t dare to ask before. When you come back, they must share them with you. Be respectful and thankful and provide the least elusive answer possible. This hack will help overcome the authority filter.
Ask one team member to share with the rest of the team something that they assume everybody knows. For example, it can be something related to an ongoing project/product, an incident that happened recently or an organizational change in any part of the enterprise.
7: Future-focused Mindset
High performance can disappear if the future brings new situations or disruptions, internal or external, that the team is not ready to cope with. So keeping an eye ahead to the future is the antidote.
To develop a growth mindset, we need:
- Previse potential future scenarios as well new competitors, new disruptions, and new technologies.
- Set enough challenges.
- Celebrate progress as it happens.
- Provide regular feedback.
Hacks for Instilling a Future-Focused Mindset
For one day, default to “Why not do it?” rather than “Why do it?” for every proposal.
Ask team members to share “stories of the future,” where some internal or external stakeholder will benefit from one of our specific actions (such as a project or a product we are developing now or are about to start developing). Looking ahead to the good that the future brings helps develop behaviors that will make it happen.