And the biggest thing is when someone might do their job, they might actually be really crushing it in their job, but the second and better opportunity comes up, they're gone because what are they really there to stay for?
Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I'm Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant through this show and my signature ops playbook. I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech. to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn't mattLiaer if you're a business owner who realized that running a team isn't as easy as you thought it would be.
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Welcome back to the show. Today I want to answer a question you have asked, Which is how to create a strong culture on my team. And this is one of those things I think we're all kind of wondering that, right? We all know we could do better.
Some of us have little tips and tools that we've deployed that have worked really well. Others of us are struggling. We're thinking, well, I've been really trying at this, but culture is something that is more experienced or felt than, than observed sometimes. But there are specific things that we can do to build a stronger culture.
And that's what I want to talk about today. First, it's always helpful to say, well, what, what happens when we don't have a strong culture? People don't rise to the occasion and step up when, when someone needs help or there's anything that's kind of out of the norm, people really treat their job as task completion, I'm doing the bare minimum that that's one of the products of not having a strong culture.
We also see that people don't really help each other out. You don't always see strong collaboration when you haven't invested in culture. And the biggest thing is when some, when someone might do their job, they might actually be really crushing it in their job, but the second and better opportunity comes up, they're gone.
Because what are they really there to stay for? That's why this is so important. And by treating it with an intentionality and sometimes investing financially in it, this can really change the game and make your team and your business a destination for people to come and stay and do their best work.
One more thing about culture is it can actually start to be a burnout preventer or resilience builder because we feel aligned, we feel in support, we feel invested in, and then we feel more comfortable investing a little bit extra of our own self. When we talk about culture, it's important to talk about team values.
And doing a values exercise is critically important as a team, as a business. Even if you are within a larger company and there's company level values, figure out what those are for your teams, which essentially are really operating principles, right? What are our, our deeply held beliefs about how we work together?
And this is so important because it governs the kind of decisions you make and it sets the tone for what is this culture about? And I love to use statements or a pairing of words. So for example, I recently heard from an awesome business owner of a fractional CTO company. So they, they deliver technology solutions to entrepreneurs and businesses.
And the CEO shared the value of do what we say we're going to do. And we were talking about this. We said, well, the value could be integrity. It could be, you know, accountability. But when you say it in terms of do what we say we're going to do now, everyone in your team is bought in. They understand what that means.
And so when I'm working with teams on how to really streamline their operations, how to get things on more effectively, we always start with values because we all have to be really clear on how are we working? How are we showing up? The work I do is about the house. So we need to know how at its deepest core level, this is the real essence of the house, our values.
I like to do an exercise with my team. Just kind of giving you a little tip and tool to try is asking folks, individually share values and qualities that are important to them. Then talking about as a team, well, what do we need to do to bring this to life? Yeah. And then creating a set of statements that really embodies those things.
Once you have values, well, now you see, okay, what do we stand for? And that is the first ingredient in culture. And now I want to kind of shift into what are ways that you as a leader can show up to both model those values and those behaviors and really create a culture where like, what are we actually trying to do with this?
So the culture is going to be coming out of the values. And what are the themes here? A lot of times I would guess it's something around customer service, customer experience, delivering great results. It's around supporting each other as a team. And it's something around, maybe it's the delivering great technology or delivering great service, right?
Something around actually the essence of the work. And that could be a helpful framing for where to center your values or even your mission around. The first thing I think is utmost important to build a strong culture as a business owner, as a team leader, is to show up. Now, even if your value and your team is not, you haven't stated integrity explicitly, showing up for your team and being there, you ask people to work in the office, you're showing up.
You are asking people to pull a late night. You're there. Okay. This was also an example of something that builds respect on teams. I talked about this in my episode on how to earn respect because showing up. Rolling up your sleeves and really being there with your team that is going to show them that, Hey, it is not a one way street.
You're not looking back from your corner office, like just trying to shout out orders that you get it. You get what it takes to be successful as company, and that is going to create the culture where other people show up for you in turn. So again, that might look like, Hey, if you have to work on the weekend, you show up there and you bring lunch for everyone.
Or let's say you have a remote team and everyone has to pull late night, you send everyone a DoorDash voucher for them to order dinner for themselves and their families. Or you send a thank you note to the family if they had to miss something really important. This is something that is just game changing.
Okay? When people see, wow, this person is investing in me. I can step up. I can, I can give a little bit extra. Now, the second thing I recommend is to create cultural artifacts about your team. This is something that has so much weight, so much value, so much importance to people. This is why, you know, people will do anything, wait in line any amount of time for a free t shirt because there's something about a cultural artifact that helps us feel bought in.
This is something that Dan Coyle talks about in the book, The Culture Code. These cultural symbols that make us feel connected to something bigger. Maybe it's painted on the wall along with your values. Maybe you create a video that everyone gets to have a piece in talking about, talking about the values, something like, maybe it is some t shirts or pens or hats, right?
But really helping create, what are these cultural symbols and artifacts that everyone feels rallied around? And maybe it's because working in engineering and tech companies for a decade, I saw the value of this. But teams having an identity is extremely powerful. Maybe you have sub teams and each of them have their logo.
Maybe you have a t shirt. Maybe you have an event one day and we all get to wear the stuff and feel excited about it. It has so much power. And this kind of thing is important to folks, even if it's not important to you specifically. That's why you like swag is like a billion dollar, multi billion dollar business because people want to have something when they're excited about something, when they believe in something, they want to show them.
The third thing, and this one is always the biggest, this is my biggest tip for any way to get buy in, to get people to feel motivated, to, to, for folks to respect you as a manager. Okay. This is another one there. And to feel a strong culture and team is to have a culture of recognition of saying thank you of appreciating each other of sharing positive feedbacks of giving high fives and having that all of the time and doing that in a way where you're not the only person who is doling out the recognition.
And so another team that I spoke with recently, the business owner said they have a discretionary budget and they do this in large companies as well that I've worked with. This is a little budget that when you see something, so they have maybe an admin or an ops person doling it out. When you see someone doing something awesome, send them a gift card, say thank you, give them a 50 bonus or something like that.
At Google they had something called a peer bonus and you could give a peer a little thank you with a little monetary gift behind it. And there was so much power in that because it created a culture of recognition instead of competition. When someone jumped in to help me with a project or they sat down with me and they got me up to speed in a new role, I could give them a peer bonus as a thank you and their manager got cc'd on that.
So they felt that little boost of like, Ooh, I did something awesome. And I didn't have to go, Hey, look at me. If you're a smaller team, having someone that can own this budget that's not you, can be awesome to be able to give people little rewards and you create this sense of recognition. Maybe you have everyone gets a budget of a hundred dollars a year or a quarter to be able to give it to people and you can celebrate each other and you CC the whole team, you have five or 10 people, not that expensive an investment, right?
And people can give a little thank you and send a reply all and we can celebrate each other. You know, if you don't want to introduce monetary thank yous, you don't have to. I've been on teams where every Friday, we have a team meeting and we go around and we give high fives. I want to give a high five to Steve this week for, for jumping in and helping with this thing.
And then Steve gives a high five to Sarah and, and you just go around and you create this culture that we're always have our radar out for appreciating each other. Now that's one big thing. I think as the business owner to the leader, reframing feedback into a positive, into something that helps make us better is another tool to create a stronger culture there.
So saying, Hey, I want to give you some positive feedback about that thing. That's my number one spoiler life hack on how to make feedback less scary is to pair the word of feedback with positive and start to reassociate what is feedback. It's not negative. It's not mean. It's not scary. It's not criticism.
It's information. And we're erring on the positives and erring on the recognition so that when we have something instructive, we haven't totally diluted it with thinking it's, it's only bad. It's only when something's wrong. When we do these three things, well, let's say first, when we first set up team values that everyone understands, it feels bought into.
And this is something that I can absolutely help you with. If you want to do a values exercise with your team, send me an email at hello at Lia Garvin dot com because there are some really specific ways you can facilitate this conversation, which gets everyone bought in. And allows everyone to see kind of what their role is in upholding those values.
But if you already have values and you're ahead of the game, making sure kind of everyone gets them, it could be useful to reset them or pair that statement with it, inviting you to go and take a look at those and say, Hey, how can I bring this more to life so that everyone's really feels a part of it?
Then we do these three things. We show up for our team members. Okay. We practice what we preach. Then we create these cultural artifacts. Again, it could be a presentation template. It could be a logo. It could be some kind of swag. It'd be something that makes us feel like I'm a part of something bigger than me.
And the third one, we have a culture of recognition. And when we do those three things, we create a culture that lives beyond us telling people what to do. That's why I mentioned with recognition. You want to make sure everybody understands that, that the feedback doesn't just come from the boss. It comes from each other.
And we think each other. We think up the chain. We think down the chain. We think left, right. And we see each other and recognize the value that we're having. The culture artifacts are similar. I am proud of something. I feel like I'm a part of something. Now I want to express that in some way. And with showing up, there is nothing that is going to break a culture down and everyone feeling like that person says one thing and do something else, right?
I don't want to be on that team. Do you? No, we don't. Okay. So this is things to try. I love hearing examples. I shared a few today around values. I shared a couple around recognition that I've seen and lived through on teams. If you have specific tools that you have used to help build a strong culture, I'd love to do another episode where I share specific examples of folks.
So I'm gonna put this out there. If you want to share an example, send me an email at [email protected]. And if you want to record a 30 second clip of explaining it, that will be so cool because I can actually put that on the show and you can share your example and then we'll talk about it.
I'm inviting you to do that. If you don't know how to make a recording or you're not sure, we can hop on zoom and we can record it. We can talk about it either way. If you're interested in sharing your idea that you do in your specific team or business, it can be anonymous, or I can give you a shout out on your company, whatever works for you.
I would love to do an episode where I crowdsource. What are examples that people are doing to build a strong culture? All right. So send me an email at [email protected] if you want to submit something and let's do it. See you next time. That's all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let's spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
