Create the Right Culture to Build a High-Performing Team

As a business leader, one of your most important tasks is to set the tone for your team. You need to create the right culture to empower your team to perform at their highest level. The right culture is what separates effective teams that get results from mediocre teams that struggle.

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I made a video that looked at Google's project Aristotle, a groundbreaking study that reveals the crucial ingredients to create high-performing teams within your organization. Although not every business would be suited to take Google's approach to creating the "perfect team", it does offer a good perspective on how organizations can go about doing so.

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A simple way to understand a high-performance culture is that it’s a culture that works. Your team members have the resources and everything they need to get their job done and produce results. The right culture also contributes to a sense of satisfaction, helping you to retain good talent.

How can leaders go about creating the right culture?

Set clear goals

To establish the right culture, a leader starts by setting clear goals and benchmarks. Each member of your team needs to know where they’re going and how they’re getting there. This is the most important initial work as it impacts everything the team does thereafter.

Communicate your core values

From my experience, this is one of the key tasks that leadership teams should focus on. Clear communication about the core values of the business and ensuring all team members understand that core value - not just reading it in the corporate handbook or onboarding presentation.

Core values are the motivating factors that inspired you or the founders to start the business in the first place. Questions like: Why does your organization exist? and What change would you like to make in the world? Should be the foundation of your business culture and well understood by your team.

Define working expectations

From a business perspective, what makes a team “high performing” is their ability to get results. These results depend on set of behaviours and norms that allow the team to function as a cohesive unit.

These behaviours and norms vary across different businesses and industries. As a leader, it is your responsibility to define and clearly communicate these to your team, establishing best practices for everyone to follow. In addition to behaviours and norms, you may also want to introduce specific vocabulary that the entire team should embrace. Think about the general business jargons like "ROI", "Liquidity", "Hedging", "Lead Gen", as a starting point to develop your own.

Pinpoint challenges

As your team work towards their business goals, they will encounter obstacles and challenges. Foster a culture that promotes the identification of these hurdles and encourages overcoming them together.

Some challenges exist only in the minds of your team members. It's not always technical issues or a lack of skills that hold people back; often, they struggle with mindset issues. Identify any negative beliefs and assist team members in reframing them.

Cultivate good communication

From our experience in developing strategic plans for larger organizations, the biggest point of failure for teams executing on plans is poor communication. This includes communication between leadership and employees and among the team members as well.

No matter what type of business culture and goals you have, you need a foundation of good communication. Be proactive in fostering constant and clear communication amongst your team. Create opportunities for team members to communicate openly with each other while also seeking feedback that you can use.

Reinforce positive behaviour

It’s not enough to simply explain your culture and best practices or have quarterly meetings to remind everyone of them. You need to model good behaviour so your team members can understand exactly what it looks like in concrete terms. In addition, if you reward your team members, you should see improved performance in all areas of your business.

Always be learning

Keep an open mind and always be looking for learning opportunities to improve your leadership skills. If you’re just getting started at building your business culture, do some independent study about what makes high-performing teams click (like watching my video about Google's project Aristotle - 😛). Look for books and articles about business culture and study how results are achieved.

Next steps

Once you have your team working together, monitor results to discover what’s working and what isn’t. Choose KPIs and track behaviours and actions that are impactful so you can refine best practices for even better performance.