Lesson One, what is a team culture? So what is the team culture? And why should you care about it? One way to describe it is it's just the way things are done around here. It's a set of behavioral and social norms, things that you expect to see people doing. ways that you expect people to behave.

That's the team culture. You could also describe it as the sum of lots of individual bits of behavior. So if you think about what a culture actually is, it's really adding together all the little decisions that people make every day about whether to do this or do that, about how to speak to somebody about how to reply to an inquiry, all of that, add all that together, and you get a culture and expected way to behave in lots of different circumstances. And your culture has a big impact on what your team does. So a little bit more about what a culture is. A culture is like an invisible force that influences everybody's behavior.

And I'm going to give you a couple of examples for this. So long after childhood, if you find yourself going back into a classroom, maybe a training course or something like that, you kind of automatically know how to behave as a teacher or a lecturer at the front of the class. The pupils if you like, or students are sat in rows, and everybody kind of knows a set of behavior that goes along with being in a classroom. That's a cultural thing that most people who have been to school will be familiar with. So that's a that's a cultural innovation. In saunas, so if you go onto the underground railway in a major city, so I live near London, so I often visit London, when I go on the tube, there's a kind of way of behaving on the London Underground, which is that you kind of don't make eye contact with people.

Or if you do, it's very brief, you don't sort of stare at people, you generally don't strike up conversations with people, though now, and again, that happens, but generally you don't. And that tends to be the way it is, in all the major cities. I hear New York is like that and other places. And that's a cultural thing. Now that might differ from country to country. So there might be differences in different countries.

But this way of behaving that automatically people drop into is the culture. And so you see lots of people from lots of different cultures, visiting London, but generally they slip into the same sort of behavior that everybody else does. So that's a cultural influence. So if you go to a party on the other hand, you're expected different sets of behaviors, you'd expect that people are going to be relaxed and tell jokes and be talking to different people. And there might even be some dancing involved. And that would be completely normal in a party.

So people would expect that people might have a bit of a dance, and have jokes and so on, which would be completely normal in a party atmosphere that you say wouldn't have in a serious or summer event. So again, this is a cultural influence. So what's interesting about culture is when people behave counter to that normal culture, it feels kind of jarring, or or even shocking. So if you think about people deciding to dance on the metro, for instance, every now and again, you'll have some people trying to live and up life in in London or Paris or New York and they'll try to start singing or dancing or maybe tell jokes. On the tube or the metro, and for a moment that's really quite jarring and shocking, and that's part of the attraction, as opposed is that feeling that this is kind of out of place, this is what we don't expect, we don't expect this sort of behavior.

So there is a really strong pressure to conform to that cultural norm. That's not to say that it's impossible to behave in another way. But you have to make a real effort to do so. And that's the power of the culture. So hopefully, that's explained a little bit about what culture is and the power that it has on us. Why should we care about it?

Well, because all of the same principles that we've talked about, they're apply to organizations and teams. So when somebody starts at your organization, they will very, very quickly start noticing what the norms are, and what the general ways of behaving are. And they'll generally slip into that. They'll be absorbed by the culture. That's the way that culture works. So there's a set of norms and accepted behaviors that influence the members of your team.

Now, that's probably been there for many, many years. Now gradually, it can change and shift and it will change and shift. But generally culture is quite robust. It's not easy to shift it unless you do it on purpose. Now, the other thing about culture that is worth noting is that it's got this kind of feedback dynamic on it. So culture affects behavior.

So it has this influence on individuals behavior. But of course, it's the individuals behavior that's creating the culture. So it's got a feedback loop, whenever you get a feedback loop like that, it tends to increase the intensity of the whatever it is that you're seeing. So if you get a feedback loop in sound, for instance, it just gets louder, louder, louder. And that's because it keeps feeding off itself. So cultures tend to do that they get more and more extreme.

Now, obviously, every now and again through purposeful change, it is possible to change culture and when we do see that within our own cultures within our national cultures, that things that were accepted in the past are no longer accepted and vice versa. So cultures do change. And the only way of changing them is either through just evolution where things gradually change, or more often if we want to make that change quicker, and we have to do specific things to make that culture shift. And so that's when in a society for instance, you might get pressure groups to raise awareness of certain situations or certain causes. And part of the mission of those pressure groups is to try to convince enough people to start thinking differently about this thing. And gradually the general culture shifts and then it becomes normal to do it like x or y.

So that's the way that culture works. And we're going to apply it particularly to organizations. So how does a team culture fit into the organization's culture is an organization. In an organization, there's lots of departments or functions. So this could be a business, it could be a charity, it could be a government body. any organization will have different functions or departments that look after specific things.

Here's a typical example of a business organizations structure. So you've got departments or functions who look after finance, for instance, production, supply chain, quality sales, HR, commercial customer service, learning and development. And there's probably lots more to this a typical manufacturing type organization, but all organizations will have a similar sort of structure and in those funds or departments are the teams. inside those teams, of course, are individuals doing all that behavioral stuff. And it's the teams and the people in those teams who actually get the job done. They're the ones who decide what the overall culture is.

So what often happens in organizational culture change is that you have a corporate level, an organizational wide Transformation Program. Generally, when that's happening, you get the senior management's involved. They do a lot of work, possibly with external consultants. And then they try to engage with the teams to drive that culture. Now, in my experience, there's often a disconnect between those at the senior management level, who are trying to design a corporate or organizational culture and the way that the team Engage with that. So there can be a disconnect, there can be a gap between what the senior management think they're doing.

And the way it looks to the people on the sharp end the people in those teams, the individuals actually doing the work. And that can last for a long time. to support my point, if you do a simple internet search for typical stated values of businesses and organizations, so if you put the values of, and then put any random organization you want to, you'll probably find values like these trust, respects, care, pride, can do customer focus, those sorts of really positive values. And they'll often talk about a culture that supports all of those values. And it's really the culture that will decide whether your business or your organization is actually An organization of trust or respect, or can do now at the risk of sounding cynical, many of those organizations that claim that they have a culture of trust, customer focus, so on and so on, are really just paying lip service to that.

The reality is on the ground that people don't feel that their customers don't necessarily feel that there's often high profile scandals or examples when the company or the organization has failed to live up to those values. And when investigations happen, we tend to see that actually the culture was wrong. It wasn't the way that he was meant to be. And that proves that there's a disconnect between what the senior management think the culture is about, and what's actually happening on the ground. So this series of courses, isn't aimed at the organizational level. It's not talking to senior managers, senior director People at that organizational strategic level, it's actually aimed at you.

If you're a team leader, or first line manager, second line manager, somebody who is responsible for a team at the sharp end actually doing the work. So really wants to talk to you, if you're that sort of person. The reason I'm talking to you if you're a team leader, supervisor, Junior manager, middle manager, is because it's the bit you have direct control over. You can have direct control over your team and the people in your team. So you've got influence that you can use at that level. If your organization is already working on a culture change or a transformation project, great.

These programs will help you support that. But I'm not assuming that your organization is doing that. So if your organization is way behind you on the need for the right culture, then do it yourself, create a cultural island with your team. rather than waiting for somebody else to do it, take the initiative and start to create the culture that you want within your area of influence, which is your team and the people in it. Now, of course, it's not easy, but you can start something special, and maybe others will follow. Now, in order to do this, you're going to need a few things.

You're going to need vision. You have to start to think about what your culture could be like what the team culture could be. You're going to need determination, because it's not going to be easy. And there will be times when you feel disheartened. And you might have setbacks. You do need realistic expectations, things will not happen overnight.

And there's a little bit of know how that you need to. That's what the course is for