1. Team Culture General
What exactly is “Team Culture”
Team Culture is an agreement between all team members on how we want our team to work. This is based on:
How we want the team to work - The Team Values
Learnings from Past Experiences - The Best Practices
The Football Team analogy
If we were a football team then we would have to answer a lot of strategy questions:
Do we want to have a clear identity on how we play or do we want to adjust to each game?
Do we want to play an attacking, defensive system or a balanced system?
Do we want to play possession, counter-attacking or take a more balanced approach?
The Team Values are our team’s answers at the Strategy Level. This is how we want to play
We would also have a lot of Tactical Questions:
How do we play to maximize our strengths and weaknesses?
How to move the ball forward against an opponent that uses aggressive pressing?
The Best Practices are the Tactics we have learned and developed based on our own experience and our capacity to learn from the experience of others.
Why do we need a Culture
It’s easy to see why you need both Strategy and Tactics when trying to build the best Football team in the world. You can put the best players on the field, but if they don’t work together towards the same goal, and using commonly agreed Tactics they will lose to a worse team that has that.
If we can see how much Strategy & Tactics affect a team that consists of 11 Football players, with a clear goal of putting the ball at the back of the net,
→ then we should be able to see how Values and Best Practices affect a team of 100+ people and can be the difference between a team that is average (and you hate working there) and a World Class team that is challenging but brings out our best self.
As a Team, we want to build one of the best teams in the world. The Team Culture is our way of making that happen.
The Culture is alive, and it’s always evolving
We view culture as a product. This means that we:
Design Culture in a way we Design our Product.
We decide how we want it to evolve (Team Values) and
Take Steps in that direction.
Similarly to product, we avoid taking Steps in the opposite direction even if those would help us in the short-term
Use the https://ideas2life.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/work/pages/1570472258 to:
Build MVPs with limited scope
Measure their effect, and get Feedback from the Customer (The Team is the Customer of the Culture)
Build a new Improved version based on the learnings
Culture and Best Practices are driven by Team Members, and you should always be looking to Lead the way in any direction you strongly believe in
It’s Important. For the Team and for You
Culture is critical for the team. It’s how we try to build one of the best Teams in the World. This is why it’s one half of the Performance Formula Approach x Results
Culture is equally important for each individual team member. Building a great culture is the best way “build our own future” and build a team that we are happy and proud to be part of.
Letting the culture fall to the lowest common denominator instead of building it at the highest standard is an almost certain way to guarantee that we do not have a positive future within the team.