The behaviors we show each other in the workplace, the values we base our decisions on and how we handle success and failures are all aspects of our company culture. Building a great culture that makes people thrive is vital for the company success and for being a great place to work. In this post I have summarized some of the things we do as leaders to build a great culture.
Posts related to building a culture can be found in the Building a Great Culture category
Creating a great place to work
Drive cultural improvements. The goal is that our organization should live up to our values and be a great place to work. This needs a constant attention and you will need to work on improving things to create the culture you are after. It could be things like providing bias trainings to increase inclusive behaviors or an initiative to increase the skills in giving and receiving feedback or decision making or something else.
Diversity and inclusion. Two really important topics. Diverse teams that collaborate well will produce greater results but diversity is not enough. You need to work actively on building an inclusive culture where everyone feel accepted and appreciated. This is a difficult things since people’s good intent will not be enough, everyone will need to challenge their own unconscious biases to build a truly inclusive culture. Inclusive facilitation techniques and bias training are a few examples of things you can do to improve inclusion. Hiring that focuses on diversity aspects is another thing that can have impact. Making people aware and observant and encouraged to highlight whenever we should improve is key to building a more diverse and inclusive culture.
Monitor the health of the organization. Depending on the tools you have at hand in the company you will have more or less information about how your organization is doing but as a manager you need to have a good feeling for how the people in the organization is doing. Are people happy, stressed, bored or frustrated and what are the reasons for that. If you have survey data at hand that is a helpful start for your monitoring but the most important tool you have at hand is to walk around in the office and ask people what’s on their mind.
Knowledge Sharing
Supporting other leaders. Sharing our experiences to align with others and continuously improve the leadership we are providing in the company. This is a super good way for more senior managers to help more junior managers to grow but it is also a very good way for the more senior managers to grow as well. The cool thing that happens when sharing your challenges and discuss which actions to take is that you get to take part in so many more experiences than the one you are experiencing in your own work with the people that you work with. Important to think about when sharing context about your situation with others is to only share as much as you need to get support and make sure to protect the integrity of the people involved.
Continuous Improvement
Building a continuous improvement organization. Everything is continuously changing around us why we need the organization to continuously evolve as well. We need to make sure that we are improving the things that needs improving.
Drive change initiatives. When something is not working as it should, and it is important enough for us to try and fix it now, you should try and find a way forward. It could be anything from asking someone for help or setting up a big change initiative for success.
Engineering Leadership in Practice by Åsa Ranneby 