Team culture is one of those things that gets talked about a lot when it is not quite right, but rarely worked on effectively. Yet so much of the outcome in the end depends on team culture. I bet that the majority of the people reading this article have experienced teams working in their own silos. Think about the influence it has on the ability of the company to drive successful outcomes. Similarly, most of the readers have probably experienced people that everyone tries to work around, because it simply takes too much effort to get them to help (or even simply do their job sometimes). When I think of the challenges that took the most energy and felt the most frustrating in my work life, the vast majority where related to team culture, and I am fairly certain that there is nothing unique about my experience.

Before we dive into what influences culture, it's worth trying to define it. I have noticed that, while everyone has a notion of what culture is, everyone seems to have a hard time describing it in words, and everyone's notion is slightly different. Generally, we tend to use fairly hand-wavy definitions, and I think that makes the challenge of addressing culture that much harder. Therefore, I think it is worth pinning the definition down in a sentence, to avoid its tendency to shape-shift as you try to reason about it. While I don't know what the best definition would be, I do have a favorite: whenever you say “That's how we do things here” - that's your culture. To be transparent, I did not come up with that definition (I just read it somewhere but I am afraid I cannot recall the author).

Given the potential benefits, one has to wonder why there is not that much material on how to address poorly functioning team culture. One of the reasons certainly has to be that it is so hard to work on. In fact, there are a number of people that do not believe one can influence culture, and that your best bet is to try to mitigate its effects. I do not subscribe to that opinion, but to the best of my knowledge there is no process or methodology to address cultural challenges. There are things one can do that can eventually influence the culture, but they are not simple recipes one can follow.

An additional inhibitor is that it represents a major investment. Cultural changes usually take a minimum of 18 months to bear fruit. Often it can be significantly longer. Add to this that there is no guarantee of success and people often become unwilling to invest the time and effort. Especially when the company is under pressure to deliver business value (which most likely is the case if there are significant cultural challenges). I have on multiple occasions heard some variant of “18 months! We'll be dead in 6 if we don't get our act together!” The implication, of course, being that one can get their act together without addressing culture.

A third inhibitor is lack of honesty about the cultural challenges. This can take two forms. In the most common case, it can manifest itself as a denial of the cultural challenges: “We don't have a culture issue, we just need to …". There is a particularly virulent form of this that I consider fatal: the teams in which speaking negatively about the culture is considered an evil to be ostracized: “We don't have a culture issue; perhaps the problem is you!". The accusation is often followed by the suggestion that the person who thinks there is a culture issue is poisoning morale and perhaps should be removed. Unsurprisingly, this has a chilling effect on any further discussion on culture. The second form of dishonesty, is the pretense that the culture challenges are acknowledged and addressed. Typically people pick something they feel comfortable acknowledging and attempting to fix, but not the real issue. A common example is labeling the challenge of teams working in silos as a communication issue (the teams would be more than happy to work together if they simply were better informed about what each other is doing), and creating some kind of all-hands meeting as a solution. Needless to say, treating the wrong symptom never really solves the right problem, but one cannot complain since “the challenge is being addressed”.

A fourth inhibitor is the fact that there is often no agreement on what the culture should be. In fact, one of the most common cultural challenges is to have a clash of two or more subcultures. By way of example, I worked in a company where there were two distinct cultures at war with each other. One group of people would probably have as their motto the phrase “Get things done!"; let's call them the executors. The other would probably have as their motto “I love my job!"; let's call them the empaths. The cultures where so distinct that you could pick almost any person in the company and easily say which group he or she was in. The weird irony in it was, that these two sub-cultures were effectively always at war with each other, but they were generally unaware of it. The executors would often talk about how “People should just do their jobs”, or about how “What matters is the outcome”, or about how we are “Too politically correct”. The empaths would talk about how “It's not about being right or wrong”, or how “People are more important than money”, or how “Happy employees are more productive”. All these clichés were in reality thinly veiled criticism at the “opposing” group, and the implication, of course, was always that the company culture should be the one that corresponded to the group the individual speaking belonged in. It does not require a stretch of the imagination to figure out why that company was never successful in addressing its culture challenges.

Now that we have described the inhibitors, what can we do to influence culture? First, I would recommend you tackle the most common challenges. If you have a lot of diversity in your team, you are probably already facing challenges related to it. The most common issue, is that people tend to attribute behaviors that are cultural in nature to flaws of character. This is most often the case with ethnic diversity, but it can apply to all forms of diversity including gender, education, race, etc. One of my favorite examples: I had a team in Lithuania for a while. In Lithuania it is quite common for people to walk to each desk and greet every person in the office when they come in in the morning. This was not perceived positively by the Swiss and American colleagues (with comments often being made about how people were wasting too much time chatting about non-work related topics). The issue existed in the other direction as well - when visiting the Lithuania office our Swiss or American colleagues would often just say a generic “Good morning” and then sit at their desk; this was perceived as cold and unfriendly by the Lithuanians. Get some cultural awareness training. The point you are trying to hammer home is simple: people do things differently in other parts of the world (or whatever the diversity dimension is). It's not better or worse; right or wrong. It's just different. Get people to distinguish between conventions and things that actually make a difference in the outcome.

Then I would recommend is to try an honest assessment of your culture. Organize an anonymous survey that asks your team how they feel about the culture, what they like, and what could be improved. Remember the definition of culture we used before? The survey should provide such a definition rather than leave it implied. For example, if I were to use the definition above, I would phrase most or all of the questions as “In our company we do things in way X as opposed to way Y.". The survey should specifically tell employees to ignore the company values! Counterintuitive as that may sound, if you have an honest interest in what your company's reality looks like, make sure you are not just setting up to hear what you told the people the answer should be. Encourage people to be as honest as possible, then take some of the most brutally honest comments (both positive and negative) and communicate them to the entire group. Then run the survey again, as now you will have people that did not have the courage to speak openly before, willing to give their honest opinion the second time around. At the end of this process, you will have at least some indications of what cultural challenges you are facing.

One of the ways you can use that information is to see what sub-cultures you may have already, and if there are clashes between them. If you do, then you have two options I can think of, but neither is particularly nice. On one hand, you could choose to segregate the cultures into distinct teams. You are likely to end up with teams that generally function well internally, but with very significant silo thinking when crossing the boundary between the two cultures. Alternatively, you could try to elevate one of the sub-cultures to the main culture of the organization. This will generate a lot of turnover, but will resolve the issue of a sub-culture clash much more definitively.

If you are growing rapidly, then you have the option of designing a culture for the new teams. I would think long and hard about what the trade-offs are. For example, people usually want teamwork together with diversity, but in reality those two tend to play against each other. An open feedback culture tends to work well for the “Get things done!” group of people, but does less well for people who want to “Love their job”. Leave the naive idea that you can have all the good factors and none of the bad factors behind, and pick what is actually important for your organization. Then seed the team with a couple of senior individuals with gravitas, who fit the prototype you have chosen. These people should be the main drivers behind the hiring and on-boarding of the new teams, so that they can impart their culture to them. This idea of seeding the culture is extremely powerful. A few years ago, at the Google EMEA Executive Forum, I was part of a breakout session that chose to discuss culture. One of the realizations we had was that for almost any company that had an easily recognizable culture, it was easily traceable to the founder(s), even for very large companies! Think of Amazon and the personality of Jeff Bezos, Apple and the personality of Steve Jobs, or SpaceX and the personality of Elon Musk.

If you are growing rapidly, you should also watch out for the two major cultural side-effects. The first is emergent culture. Just because you are not actively working towards a particular culture does not mean that the team will not have one. A culture will emerge of its own, and without your control it will be up to random influences to determine what kind of culture you end up with. Emergent cultures rarely come out the way you want them; more often than not they are the main cultural challenge you will be facing a year or two down the line. The second danger is that of culture dilution. When a team grows from a core team by rapidly hiring a lot of new people, the new people do not have enough time with “the way things are done” to absorb the culture. They start doing things differently, often creating an emergent culture of their own that washes out the culture of the core team. If that original culture was something you liked (emergent or otherwise), it will probably be lost in the process (with the core team often being quite resentful of the fact).

Finally, make sure you are addressing the inhibitors above. First of all, make it clear to everyone that it is not only OK, but even desirable to speak about shortcomings in the company culture. Make this a mantra. As much as I hate truisms, you can't fix a problem you don't know about. And emphasize honesty about what the challenges are. The organization leaders should lead by example. Ask the unpalatable questions. And be the first to say the ugly truth that everyone is afraid to verbalize. This will at least allow awareness, discussions, and acceptance. Then select a target culture. Not everyone will agree on what it should be, but if you select one, at least some people will have the culture they feel comfortable with. If you don't, no-one will. Finally, agree to invest in it. Once again the organization leaders should lead by example. If they speak in terms of not having the time or resources to fix culture, then the rest of the company will as well. The hardest thing to accept is how important culture is.