Note to reader:
The following is a guest post provided by John Winsor. John is a change leader, culture creator, people champion and talented speaker.


How are you caring for your culture?

The culture within our organizations – that elusive, hard-to-describe element that knits individuals into successful teams and elevates collective performance – needs tending even when we're not there every day to oversee it.

When we only see our team and colleagues on screen via conferencing applications, what can we do to preserve and strengthen our culture? How do we enhance who we are collectively when our everyday norms have been uprooted or removed?

In the pandemic's initial survival phase, as businesses closed physical offices and scrambled to open virtual ones, attention to the cultivation of culture was redirected to managing crises. Keeping our businesses alive became a key focus for leaders. Through this scramble, culture was not forgotten; indeed, focus on employee wellbeing, flexibility and diversity has perhaps never advanced so quickly. And many intensified their focus on culture, recognizing and anticipating the potential challenges.

More than a year into the pandemic and a crash course in crisis leadership later, thoughtful leaders continue to reflect on what their business cultures look like and what tools they can deploy to build, rebuild or improve culture.

The technology that has enabled remote working has meant the difference between business temporarily closing doors or for some, closing for good. We would not be here without it and we welcome more innovation and advancement. But face-to-face interaction and all the beautiful human nuances that come with it are what the world is missing and, arguably, craving.  

So what can we do to keep our cultures healthy and vibrant? How do we authentically care for people without the subtle but powerful in-person, face-to-face interactions we have relied on for generations to convey the core elements that make up our culture?

Before we were dispatched to our individual corners and consigned to web conferencing, we had dozens of tools we could — and did — deploy to build that collective strength of culture. Grabbing a coffee or a lunch with a colleague, chatting during the commute, gathering in the lobby, passing someone in a hallway, sticking our head into someone's office to say hello and catch up —  all arguably powerful interactions that allowed others to see and experience our behaviour. These are powerful culture-builders.

The good news is that, absent these every day opportunities, we can still apply the glue that keeps us all together and builds on our culture. With the return to the familiar office constructs uncertain, we are again looking for ways to create culture. As leaders, we are not simply responsible for caring for culture; we are accountable for enhancing it, fostering it and protecting it.

The best company culture comes from within, not only from the top down. ‘It’ starts with understanding that our behaviour is what shapes and yields our culture. Sounds self-evident, but it's not; culture isn't something that's external to us as individuals. It's what we do and how we behave that creates our culture. Perhaps counter intuitively, it's often the small, easily overlooked behaviours that have the most meaningful cultural impact. It is very much about the real, authentic care we feel for our team members and how we show it.

Here are 7 principles we can deploy that have a positive impact on our culture:

1. Be behaviorally intentional. Choosing to put our behaviours on display is the first step.
2. Seek out, uncover and value the knowledge, opinion and perspective of all team members. Knowing our thoughts and inputs are wanted, valued and needed is incredibly engaging.
3. Have conviction. Our passion and belief is contagious. Genuinely believing in the value of our organization’s culture is easily recognizable to the people around us.
4. Demonstrate empathy. Understand what's important, threatening or confusing to those around us. Real, unselfish concern for our teams — and our customers — is like a bright beacon that everyone can see.
5. Being transparent is essential. A clear, factual, un-varnished assessment of issues and challenges sends the message that nothing is being hidden or withheld.
6. Display courage — courage to do and say the uncommon, courage to say we don’t have all the answers all the time.
7. Be consistent. That includes our language, our application of policy, our attention to one another and our openness to discussing the way ahead. My friend Larry reinforces that thinking in this article as he references how ‘being clear is kind while being unclear is unkind’.

Over the last year we have had to adapt the manner in which we attempt to convey powerful emotions. When it comes to marshalling and motivating our teams, it puts a premium on the real and personal things we can — and should — do to foster a truly world-class company culture.