How to build a winning team culture
A strong team culture is often the cornerstone of any successful business. Having people who want to come to work, who uphold high standards and importantly, hold each other to those high standards is the basis on which success if founded.
The best business cultures are built around rules. But simply having rules that are handed down from the top is seldom successful. A better outcome is to have ‘buy in’ from the people employed within the business and one of the easiest ways to achieve that buy in, is by making them a part of the rule making process.
So, let me share with you one way that you can help facilitate the creation of rules within your organisation.
It’s easier to wreck than it is to build
Please allow me to digress for one moment to help illustrate a point. Imagine I have asked you to build me a car. All the pieces you’re going to need are there on the floor along with the all the required tools, you just need to assemble it.
Now if you’re a qualified mechanic you might find that straightforward enough. But assuming you’re not, then you’re probably going to find it really difficult to do, even with instructions. However, if I give you a bunch of tools and an already assembled car and ask you to pull it to pieces, chances are you’ll find that a whole lot easier.
And that’s because it’s easy to work out how to wreck things (demolishing a room in a house for example), but it’s harder to work out how to create things.
So, with that in mind, let me outline a simple way that you can create rules within your business using a workshop type of format with your team.
Ask your employees how they would destroy your business
Get your team members together, sit them down and ask them to brainstorm all the ways that they could destroy your business. Prompt them to think of things they could do to turn customers away, or dramatically decrease sales to those customers who remain.
Give them a few minutes to jot down their ideas and then ask them to start calling them out. Have someone write these ideas down, ideally on a large whiteboard (or two) or flipchart paper. Have the person writing them down write only on one side of the whiteboard.
Some of the responses could include things like ‘Show up to work late’ or ‘Be rude to customers’ or ‘Don’t reorder stock when it’s low’ etc. No matter what they are write them down.
It may be easier, depending on the size of your business, or the number of departments etc to break this down into sections such as Customer Service, Human Resources etc.
The opposite of destroying is building
Once you have a comprehensive list of things that your employees could do to wreck your business (hopefully it won’t give them any ideas), you now need to move to the other side of the whiteboard and right down the opposite.
You see it stands to reason that the opposite of something that would ruin your business would probably make it grow. So, if one of the destructive points was ‘Create an unstable work environment’ then it stands to reason that ‘Create a stable work environment’ would help to build your business.
This process works wonders for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s fun, team members have fun coming up with all the ridiculous and evil ways they could ruin the business. It’s also interactive. Unlike the typical ‘chalk and talk’ sessions this really gets your team involved. You can even break them up into groups to brainstorm on destructive ideas. You might break them up into departments or give different groups different aspects of the business that they need to work out how to ruin.
But the best part of this process is because your team are involved you get buy in from them. They take ownership of the ideas and the rules that come out of this process which then encourages them to not only follow the rules themselves but enforce those rules with others.
This is a great process and one that I would recommend for every business. If you are not comfortable running this session yourself, grab a business coach or consultant, or one of your managers and get them to run it for you. It’s a lot of fun and highly effective.
