One take on a what is needed in a good culture

People need the right skills to be productive but they also need to be in an environment that is enabling them to deliver at their best capabilities. People are collaborating with others to deliver results why we need to have a good way of collaborating to reach as much impact as possible. We need to behave in a way that enable ourselves and our colleagues to be the best versions of themselves. We need a good company culture that fosters the behaviors we believe are the right ones.

There are lots of different things that will need to be in place to form a good culture where people can thrive and there will also be some differences in what is important depending on your company and domain. There are some things that I believe will be important in all cultures in all environments and I am highlight at least some of them here.

• Trust. When people feel trusted, trust the leadership and their peers they dare to be vulnerable, feel safe to fail and challenge themselves to expand their impact beyond what the thought they could do.
• Impact and Empowerment. When people feel impactful and that they are able to deliver great value to the company they will be happy, if they can’t they will feel unhappy. You need an environment where people can have great impact. When people feel like they can influence things that matters they feel more motivated and become more engaged, take more responsibility for things that are outside of their boundaries and work harder on finding new and better ways to solve the problem at hand.
• Open and honest communication. People know what is going on and why, they feel listened to and safe to express their opinions even when they are contradictory to the main opinion. People experience that honest feedback is given and received frequently with respect with the intention to help people grow.
• Collaboration. People have fun together. Collaborating is energizing and enable us to do more together than on our own. People care for each other and offer to help when they can. By learning from each other people are expanding their own skills.
• Learning and improvement. When people feel like we are learning from our mistakes, we foster innovation by daring to take risks and be happy about learnings from the failures. We are constantly improving our ability to deliver great stuff and developing our skills and behaviors.

Building a culture is all about leadership. It is about being a role model for the culture you want. It is about praising the behavior that you think is good and correcting the behavior that you don’t want to see. You need to show people that you believe it is important that we treat each other according to the values that we have.

And even a small things like greeting people with a smile in the hallways or just ask how they are doing can have a big impact in building a friendly culture that people enjoy being in and wants to stay in.