Cultivate Your Culture: How To Rebuild Team Culture

8 min read

What you’ll learn

• Hiring as a line of defence against toxicity

• Staying connected

• Identifying culture in small businesses

In the 7th episode of Cultivate Your Culture, Zoran and Kimia Hamidi spoke about how team leaders can facilitate the growth of culture on their teams either on the field or in business. Kimi is the founder of Buyer, a negotiation service for tech-focused companies aiming to save them money.

The Metaphorical Glue

Kimia broadly defines team culture as the shared sets of beliefs, rituals, and values that any team grows and believes in that leads them to execute a mission. Whether this mission is to score goals or grow the company financially, how the team gets there while sharing aligned values defines the team culture. However, Kimia notes that his own answer has changed over the years, and likely will again, as how we think about team culture evolves over time.  

Kimia notes that in his experience, teams that don’t spend time cultivating their culture fall apart before reaching their goal, as culture is made up of how all the individuals on the team interact. For example, on sports teams where the culture is toxic, you’ll often see players bickering instead of strategizing. Kimia also finds that the values and processes behind cultivating culture are mostly the same between business and sports. While the culture in a recreational sports team may be less intense than in a multi-million dollar company, it is important in both to intentionally shape your culture around the values that you want to foster.

Editing Culture

Kimia says that culture begins with the leadership team and stresses the importance of this especially in start-ups. In the beginning you as the single founder are the culture, and the minute you begin to expand, the interactions you have with your leadership team becomes the bedrock of the company. Kimia thinks about his role as a leader as similar to that of an editor-in-chief. Editors synthesize information and are constantly checking to see if the overall mission has been achieved. Use this idea to edit your team: if values are misaligned, get rid of the people causing that disturbance quickly before it sends shockwaves throughout the bedrock of your organization.

Defending your culture against toxicity begins at the hiring process. Kimia stresses the idea of hiring slow to make sure you have the right candidate over hiring people with sole intention of filling roles only to fire them if they aren’t a good fit. What you want is to hire people who exhibit the same values as those you are trying to promote in the company. It’s also important to be able to identify if these values are authentic, and for that Kimia suggests allowing those who will be directly working with the new hire to have a say in who their new teammate will be. They may see something in their interview façade that you don’t. While hiring quickly may seem like the key to growth, in reality you want to bring on people who can go farther together, and this will preserve your team culture further down the road.

Virtual Coffee

To Kimia, cultivating culture is setting the standard as the company grows. As your team expands around you, how are you going to make sure they’re all operating with the shared values in mind? One tool that Kimia uses, especially in the online workspace, is to Zoom with all core teams and discuss what they believe the values of the company are. Make note of what is said in these discussions, summarize them in one document, and share it with the entire team. This is an excellent way to not only identify misalignment, but to allow all teammates to have a voice. Kimia also makes use of morning and end of day “synchs” in order to facilitate task and social cohesion. Have the core teams meet often in the morning to catch up socially and run through the tasks of the day, and then at the end of the day identify the challenges needing extra care, major events that took place, and wrap up. The casual conversation allows teammates to connect on a personal level, while the task management keeps everyone on track with regards to progress and how they contribute to the mission.

Kimia also spoke about how cultivating culture has changed with the transition of in person offices to online spaces. He finds that there’s an extra element of force you have to apply to keep the culture growing in the right direction, and it’s more important to be attentive. You as a leader have to get creative in finding ways to connect with your teammates.

Making it Happen

Look at the questions you use in your interviews. Are they generic and surface level, or do they allow the interviewee to delve into positive qualities such as honesty and integrity?

 Learn how to perform a cultural audit on last week’s episode HERE, and how to identify and remove toxic behaviours before they grow HERE.

 For additional resources, Kimia suggests checking out what Patty McCord of Netflix has to say on team building, and Steve Newcomb’s essay Cult Creation.