I’ve heard people say this about their team.

But I quickly understood they meant that they didn’t feel connected to their colleagues or have any sense of social activity.

When people say that they don’t have a team culture, it comes down to a few misconceptions about what it really is.

Firstly, they’re conflating culture with “vibes” — the intangible, buzzy feeling people get when good relationships naturally gel. This feeling is great when it happens, but it’s not always guaranteed.

Secondly, they’re assuming that culture is only about cohesion. It’s important, but it’s not the only factor. “Cohesion” is just one of the pillars on Bracket’s five-pillar framework (alignment, cohesion, communication, design and change).

Every team has a culture, whether they are aware of it or not. In fact, for the people who say they don’t have one, the lack of cohesion is a feature of their culture.

Team culture shows up in many places — in meetings, in the channels a team uses to communicate, in how they share information, in how well they know each other’s working styles, and in how they problem-solve together and make decisions.

All of these elements can emerge naturally and therefore feel undefined. Or, they can be intentionally designed to make sure they provide necessary structure and direction. And when culture is intentional, it brings an element of consistency to how team members experience the culture.

Does everyone experience your team culture the same way?

When we run our team culture diagnostic, it includes an anonymous survey for every team member to take. Each respondent rates a series of statements, based on our framework, on a scale of 1-5.

We ask them to assess statements like:

• We have a clear vision and clear goals as a team.

• I feel trusted to do my work in the way I know best.

• I feel comfortable productively challenging others’ views on the team.

• I am up-to-date with the information I need to do my work effectively.

• We have regular conversations about how we work together as a team.

When all the results are in, we review three areas to help us identify a team’s strengths and opportunity areas so that we can start to build their development journey: 1) the average score for each pillar, 2) the average score for each statement and 3) the overall average team culture score.

However, there’s also something else we look out for — the spread of scores across each statement.

If a statement has scores concentrated across two, maybe three, points, whether higher or lower along the scale, that tells us that team members are mainly aligned in their perception of that area.

But if the scores spread across the whole scale from 1 to 5, it tells us that team members may view their culture very differently. And where perceptions vary that widely, there is rarely a strong culture that connects the team.

So when we start work with a team that has these kinds of results, it’s not just about improving scores overall. We also want them to become more concentrated so that we’re moving towards a more consistent experience of the culture for everyone.

Consistency, not conformity

The aim of creating a consistent culture experience is not for everyone to conform or to force people into rigid ways of working — a good culture is designed with the diversity of a team in mind. It’s to ensure that everyone has access to the same experience by increasing transparency and reducing ambiguity.

Of course, you won’t have any control over individual responses — this is still deeply personal — and you may still have outliers where the culture is perceived as better or worse than the majority.

But a culture designed with intention will mean that you’ll be able to spot these more easily and notice that there may be some people who are feeling disconnected or disengaged, maybe even excluded. It will give you clearer information about what you might need tweak or improve to keep bringing that experience into more alignment.

This becomes even more important if you have a hybrid team — some people in-office, some remote — where you need to pay more attention to those team members who are working remotely.

What designing for culture consistency looks like

Designing for consistency means building clarity and articulating the culture, both current and desired so that you can define goals, behaviours, ways of working, systems and structures that will enable your team, within its specific context, to operate at its best.

This involves understanding the needs of the individuals, the work the team does and the environment it works within to explore what can be put in place to support everyone to thrive.

Things like:

• A shared understanding of the team’s identity, purpose and goals, with values or working principles that translate into daily behaviours — a sense of what makes the team unique

• Well-designed meetings and a meeting cadence — formats for meetings that are purposeful, interactive and productive, and scheduled intentionally to support the work that needs to get done

• Defined communication methods so that team members have the right forums to share and access the information they need to stay informed and make progress.

These may sound simple, but they go a long way to building a common understanding and feeling of belonging, even more so when these elements are co-created together as a team.

This clarity brings a sense of stability and familiarity, especially when a team is experiencing a lot of change. Having these foundations in place makes it easier to evolve and tweak them as necessary.

What else would make sense for your team?

***

What creates a strong sense of team culture isn’t just the social events or the good vibes — it’s the everyday practices built into the work itself, like check-ins, team reflections, and regular meetings. When these are intentional and consistent, connection comes as a result. Social activity becomes a by-product of a strong culture, not what you’re relying on to create it.

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The post Your team has a culture. But does everyone experience it the same? appeared first on Bracket.

Leaders can’t have all the answers. And so it becomes vital that they have the skills to effectively empower their teams to operate at their best so that they can solve problems and move fast together.

If this rings true for you, this means evolving how you see your role, from managing several one-to-one relationships between you and your direct reports, to intentionally cultivating the team dynamic between them, so that people collaborate better, share ideas and challenge each other’s thinking.

This is where facilitation comes in.

Facilitation is more than just a workshop technique that you use on special occasions. It can become a way of leading that shows up in how you interact with your team.

When done well, bringing facilitation into your leadership approach gives your team everything they need to do their best work together. It involves a combination of strategic thinking, designing the right environment, turning ideas into action, and understanding behaviour change.

The most immediate and practical place to start introducing facilitation is in how you run your team meetings.

When you bring facilitation to your meetings, it:

• creates the environment for people to be both creative and productive

• ensures everyone feels able to contribute

• builds connection and better communication across the team

• promotes proactive ideas generation, problem-solving and experimentation

• encourages real progress and productivity

And all of this can have a big impact on your team culture more widely.

What facilitation really is

Facilitation is about designing and guiding conversations that help a group of people think, work and make decisions together. A facilitator focuses on the process so that the group can focus on the content. Rather than having the answers themselves, a facilitator creates the space for the team to problem-solve together.

Facilitation isn’t just for off-sites, big workshops or client-facing sessions. And it also doesn’t have to be all about high-energy activities or you performing for or ‘entertaining’ your team. In fact, the most powerful sessions I’ve facilitated have been a series of well-crafted activities where participants have purposeful, focused conversations without seeing me as central to the discussion.

Great facilitation is also firmly rooted in business goals. It involves understanding the context, the team, what led to the session, and what might happen after, to ensure it is truly useful and drives real change.

So, what’s stopping leaders from using facilitation more?

Some real barriers and challenges might stop leaders from bringing more facilitation into their leadership.

First, naturally, is a lack of time and the mental space to think differently about how to run meetings. It takes some thinking and discipline to design them intentionally and make sure the outputs and actions are followed through.

Secondly, not seeing it or experiencing it in practice. Meeting culture across most organisations is notoriously broken, and well-facilitated meetings are the exception rather than the rule. This often means leaders need to look externally to learn these skills.

Thirdly, the risk of trying something new. Time is precious, and even if there’s a real desire to improve things, if a new approach doesn’t work immediately, leaders can quickly default to what they know, even if that isn’t optimal.

Finally, a lack of support across the wider business. It takes conscious effort to bring facilitation into your practice. This is much harder if it isn’t recognised as valuable from a higher level, or more generally across the business.

How to start bringing more facilitation into your leadership

You don’t need to fix everything at once to make a difference. Here’s where to start.

Start small. Don’t try to change every meeting at once or even attempt to redesign an entire meeting. Start with one part of an existing meeting where you introduce a facilitated discussion and notice what happens.

Use our planning template to design your meetings with intention. Before you think about structure or activities, get clear on: the purpose and outcomes (why does this meeting need to happen and what do you and your team need to get out of it), the outputs (what will actually be produced as a result), and questions (what your team needs to explore together to get there).

Develop these four core skills. Facilitation can feel daunting because it is so much about reading the room, picking up on cues and keeping the conversation on track. But focusing on just these four skills can get you started:

• Curiosity and asking questions: In addition to the questions you’ve used to design your meeting, use questions during your meeting as your main communication method to encourage and build on ideas.

• Active listening: When people share their thoughts, confirm and acknowledge their contribution. You can also create intentional moments of silence by asking your team to note their ideas individually before sharing their thoughts out loud.

• Dealing with uncertainty: You won’t always feel in control. Inviting diverse perspectives and creativity may feel messy, and that is a natural part of the process. Get more familiar with it.

• Synthesis: Be prepared to round off conversations by stepping in to draw out main points and identify next steps.

  

You do not need to be a ‘pro’ at a wide range of tools before you are ready to facilitate. Having a clear purpose, armed with a set of questions and the core skills above, will be enough to get you started.

***

When you start to introduce more facilitation to your meetings, you may be surprised at where else these skills show up: better listening, trusting your team more (and your team feeling it), being able to better deal with uncertain and complex situations, and more confidence to manage team dynamics and tricky situations. Gradually, facilitation will become more than just how you run meetings. It will be how you lead your team.

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The post Better by design: how facilitation can transform leadership appeared first on Bracket.

The truth is, building a healthy team culture is full of tensions and paradoxes like this. Often, one thing you need to manage feels at odds with another thing you need to consider. But somehow, both are essential.

Team culture is complex because it involves bringing people together with a wide range of skills, personalities and perspectives, working within an environment that is constantly changing. And it often feels as if that complexity has increased tenfold in recent years, with less time and resources to spend on culture-building to do it effectively.

Here are a few more paradoxes I’ve noticed in my work with clients:

Paradox 1: Team culture development has to be both strategic and tactical

You need a clear direction of what you want to achieve, both in terms of results and how your culture needs to support this. This is high-level work that focuses on the long game – looking to the future and working towards it.

But you also need to be able to translate that vision into desired behaviours that can be made explicit through repeatable habits and actions in the short term, such as how you communicate, run meetings and give feedback.

While this may sound transactional, that’s exactly what’s needed. It’s the small actions, performed consistently by your whole team, that will lead to change.

And at the same time, the actions that happen on the ground will feel disconnected and arbitrary if they aren’t guided by the big picture. It’s the vision that gives purpose to those daily interactions when they are considered in tandem.

Paradox 2: Understanding individual behaviour change in a collective environment

An individual’s capacity to change their behaviour is shaped by personality, background, mindset and outlook on life. And so a behaviour that seems simple on the surface – such as “ask more questions” – may be easy for one person and very difficult for another. Not because the action itself is hard, but developing it as a habit is.

If someone has further to go in developing a growth mindset, cultivating curiosity or more experimentation, and those are things that the whole team needs to build, consider that it may take a while to gain collective momentum.

We need to set goals for change at the team level, and we also need to zoom in at the individual level to understand where there are personal blockers.

Definitions of behaviour need to be clear so they are less open to interpretation, as well as keeping discussion open, flexible and empathetic throughout a change process and providing opportunities for check-ins and coaching so that you can see where certain people may be struggling (or resistant).

Paradox 3: Structure creates creative freedom and autonomy

There’s a popular saying: “Hire the best people and then get out of their way.”

I disagree. I think it should be: “Hire the best people and give them what they need to perform at their best.”

While most of us want more autonomy at work, it can be misinterpreted as leaders being completely hands-off. While some people may resist structure, providing just the right amount makes creative freedom possible in a way that keeps a team connected and on track.

We often rely too much on willpower to change culture, when we can use systems and structures to encourage desired behaviours and create the environment we need.

Part of a leader’s role should be to reduce friction and remove barriers to getting work done, so that a team can spend more time doing their best thinking. That starts with looking at where aspects of work might unintentionally encourage the wrong behaviours or block progress.

Paradox 4: You have to slow down to speed up

When a team is under pressure to deliver, the instinct is to push harder and move faster. But sometimes the most productive thing you can do is pause.

If a team is consistently arguing about the same small issues or is repeatedly running into similar problems, it’s worth asking whether something bigger is happening underneath the surface.

Those nagging little problems are often pointing to something larger. And the most sustainable approach is to take a proper look under the bonnet to understand what’s really happening, so it can be addressed at the root cause.

This takes time. But once it’s addressed, it’s what creates the space to innovate, experiment and do the work that actually matters. And that’s when a team can start to move faster.

***

These paradoxes are why culture can feel so difficult to get right. And they’re also the reason why every team member – not just the leader – needs to be involved in shaping it. When you have more eyes on what’s happening, there’s more opportunity to notice these paradoxes and look at them from different perspectives.

This also requires ensuring the right conversations happen when needed, even if they might be difficult. It’s why facilitation is such a key tool for culture development. It enables teams to make sense of what’s happening together, build clarity and make progress where it matters.

Bracket’s five-pillar framework (alignment, cohesion, communication, design and change) is designed to make building a healthy team culture more achievable. Just because culture is complex, it doesn’t mean the approach to building it has to be. Find out more about the framework here.

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The post Embracing tension: the paradoxes of building team culture appeared first on Bracket.

Although we know that these factors are intrinsically linked – happy and engaged people lead to better business – that doesn’t make it any easier to balance the two.

It can often feel that real high performance comes at the expense of individual well-being, or that if we focus too much on employee happiness and engagement, people won’t be fully productive.

Regardless, it’s evident that leaning too far towards either business or people is never going to bring optimal results, nor be sustainable.

When priorities tip too far

The most natural tendency is to over-index on achieving results above all else. Our workplaces value and reward productivity, and it takes real discipline to ensure this doesn’t become disproportionate.

But when we focus on business outcomes at all costs, and for extended periods of time, anything perceived as “people-focused” (i.e. culture) takes a backseat. We get unhealthy competition in our teams, stress and burnout, and high attrition.

Maybe it’s the fear of what we consider the alternative that keeps us there – that prioritising people’s happiness regardless of the impact on business leads to a lack of accountability and mediocre results.

When a leader focuses on the comfort of their team over what the business needs, their team will drain more resources than the value they create. So no one wants to be here either.

The calibrating act

To successfully build a high-performing and happy team, leaders need to be both performance-driven and people-centred.

So how do we approach it?

Think about it as if you’re standing on a wobble board. You’re never going to be completely stable all the time, but you need great core strength to try not to tilt over in either direction and aim to rebalance when it does.

When leading, rather than trying to find and maintain the perfect balance, it’s more like continuously calibrating. It requires nuance, adaptability and a dynamic approach to team culture that you regularly revisit and refine.

There may even be periods where there’s a temporary need to prioritise business over people or vice versa, but with a clear sense that it is not forever, and knowing you’ll need to shift that emphasis in the future.

This might require taking action that feels like it’s pulling in the opposite direction:

• Slowing down to focus on culture when there is a bias towards urgency

• Addressing dysfunctional behaviours, even though team members are exceeding their targets

• Disrupting the status quo by introducing a new idea or change when your team feels a sense of stability

• Holding people to account, challenging them and having difficult conversations when results are slipping.

I’ve met only a few leaders who are naturally skilled at this and can deftly navigate these tensions. For the rest of us, we skew towards one or the other and need to develop this capability.

A practical framework

One reason I developed the five-pillar framework was to provide a practical way to manage this challenge.

Each pillar puts people at the centre in service of the business. A leader’s role is to facilitate collaborative (or workshop-like) conversations around these five pillars so that people and business stay connected.

Alignment – having visibility over the ‘why’ behind the work – the bigger picture –  with a clear purpose, vision and goals, motivates and engages the team. Values and working principles are created and translated to behaviours so that they connect to what the team is trying to achieve.

Cohesion – everyone can see their individual contribution to the team’s higher-level goals, and each person’s expertise and input is valued and appreciated. This requires recognising the diverse skills sets and ways of working across the team as essential to business success.

Communication – ensuring everyone feels comfortable to speak up, feels heard and has access to the information they need to work effectively. This involves running meetings that are structured to create value together, keep business moving forward and are engaging and relevant spaces for team members.

Design – crafting unique ways of working – structures, systems and processes – based on the people in the team and what they need to achieve together, that are set up for them to perform at their best.

Change – a team staying accountable to their goals by regularly assessing whether their ways of working are helping or hindering progress. They stay tuned into what the business needs to ensure their habits match and enable them to continue their success.

When guided by these areas, paying attention to team culture is not seen as secondary – it’s embedded into the work. Team building is not a separate activity that happens “when there’s time”. It happens as a team works, to support the work.

When you design team culture for healthy people and a healthy business, it creates a virtuous cycle.

To effectively ensure business demands and people needs do not feel at odds with other, create culture goals alongside business goals. Ask your team: what culture needs to exist for us to achieve these goals? Then create values or working principles that reflect this collective performance, design the structures and systems that make these behaviours easier and hold each other accountable for living up to them.

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The post A calibrating act: the art of balancing people and performance appeared first on Bracket.

“This has come at a busy time.”

But it’s always followed by how much participants valued the time together to reflect, share ideas, learn more about each other and think about the big picture.

Someone even said “forced time together to reflect”, and meant it as a compliment.

While I don’t like to think this work is about forcing anyone to do anything, it’s a key point.

We’re always going to be busy, but when we finally carve out time for team reflection, we realise how valuable it is. 

We know our best ideas come when we’re not in back-to-back meetings and head down in our to-do lists. We know our work improves when we make space for deeper thinking. 

Yet, we don’t often allow ourselves to do it together.

While we will always have “urgent and important” tasks, we also need to take time for the “important, but not urgent”.

And that time often only comes when we intentionally carve it out, during a programme like ours, or otherwise.

(N.B. This reflection time doesn’t need to be about team culture – it can be anything that provides a space to pause and think.)

Here are some things I’ve noticed happen when teams get this time.

Learning more about the person behind the work

In an increasingly digital world, work can become overly transactional. We might save time when we mostly communicate through email, Slack and comments in documents, but we can lose context.

When we learn a little more about our colleagues’ personalities, their approach to work and their communication style, it can soften interactions that may seem sharp on the surface. 

The social glue we develop when getting to know each other makes us less likely to make assumptions. And if conflict does occur, we have already built the connection that enables us to address and resolve it more quickly. 

Try: Ask your colleagues about their previous experiences – personal and professional – and how it has shaped their approach to work. 

Understanding more about each other’s expertise

More than getting to know people on a personal level, it’s also about having more insight about the range of skills and knowledge you have on your team. When your team knows who to go to for what, they can save significant time in getting their questions answered.

This opens up opportunities for giving and getting support from each other, quicker problem-solving and creating value by collaborating on new ideas. 

Try: asking what your colleagues would love to do more of if they had the time, or what they could offer/share with others.

Realising you share similar challenges

I once heard an audible sigh of relief in a workshop when one person openly shared a challenge that it seems many others have also been holding. This can be extremely connecting as a team.

Firstly, it shows team members that they are not the only ones struggling with a particular problem. Secondly, once these common challenges are surfaced, the team can create a unified approach to addressing them.

This starts to build a team of peers who realise they are on the same side of a problem.

Try: ask everyone to share a tension that keeps coming up in their work. If it comes up multiple times, it could signal a team-level tradeoff. When you get to the root of this, it could release some significant pressure in your team.

***

What’s interesting about having more conversations like this is that, eventually, you’ll need fewer of them! The time you spend upfront will save you time later. As you start to embed new collaboration behaviours and team habits, working on team culture becomes less of a project and more of a practice.

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The post Time well spent: what happens when teams reflect together appeared first on Bracket.

The team had left the room, and I was debriefing with the leader. The chairs were still in the circular layout we had created at the start of the day.

The leader pointed to each chair one by one and assigned the person who had been sitting there one of two labels – burnt out or disengaged.

This leader had inherited a team that was getting their work done but struggling behind the scenes with dysfunction. It was putting a real strain on everyone’s energy and motivation. Despite managing to hold it together, the team couldn’t last like this for much longer.

This workshop was the first step to addressing it.

Perhaps this is a scenario you’re experiencing. You’ve recently taken on a new leadership role, and the team for which you are now responsible has problems with conflict, is unhappy, and the atmosphere feels heavy. Your predecessor wasn’t able to address it, or in some cases, even ignored or avoided it.

You’re more forward-thinking with a different leadership style and understand the value of intentional culture-building. You’re committed to improving the situation because you want a better environment for your team. You know that resolving this dysfunction is essential to achieving the business success you’re working towards.

However, because it’s been unaddressed for a while, the rifts run deep. The team has lost trust, and there is a big cultural debt to work through. This is what happens when superficial fixes have been applied to more significant challenges.

It will require a bold approach to turn this around.

Getting to the heart of the matter

Although on the surface, team dysfunction may present as people simply “not getting along”, there are often underlying, more complex factors that are causing it. 

As the team’s new leader, you will need to discover the full picture, which could be a mixture of:

• The team’s history and long-standing personality-based conflicts. Team members may have started to avoid each other, limit interactions and become protective, which is impacting the quality of work
• The environment within which the team operates. Team members’ work could lead them to operate under constant high pressure. Lots of change and uncertainty in the organisation could be causing insecurity, or wider market changes may bring apprehension and worry. 
• Systems and structures that are not set up for the team to perform at its best. This could be causing overlap or even direct conflict between roles and strained communication lines. Or high workloads paired with a lack of direction are burning out the team.
• Challenges that are a natural result of the work that haven’t been articulated or addressed openly and effectively. The team keep bumping up against these invisible roadblocks, and they feel frustrated and insecure.

There may be elements you find that need a direct ‘fix’ and others that just need to be acknowledged and discussed. However, any clearly harmful behaviours should be addressed as soon as possible. 

It’s also vital to recognise the areas that are working, so the team can appreciate them and double down on their positive characteristics. 

Uncomfortable unravelling

It’s a natural tendency to want to solve this quickly, but these factors will often unravel over time. While team workshops and off-sites can support the turnaround process, these deep-rooted cultural problems cannot be solved in a single session. It’s possible, but unlikely, that you’ll experience that immediate, seismic bang of change.

This isn’t traditional “teambuilding” as we understand it – the fun, energetic activities that are all “high fives and good vibes”. This unwinding will involve some discomfort as you shine a spotlight on the things that aren’t working. It may feel messy.

However, you will need to bring people together to address some of these challenges, so these sessions are an opportunity to observe team dynamics in a way that is not possible to see in day-to-day work. Dysfunction in work life is experienced in“pockets”, such as short, heated exchanges in meetings, quick comments, email threads, and the replay of events in one-to-one conversations. 

These interactions become concentrated in a facilitated workshop, allowing the whole team to witness the culture in real-time. This often leads to validation, insights and breakthroughs and becomes a catalyst for kickstarting the change process.

Rebuilding trust

It’s likely that the team members, despite being talented individuals, have adopted unhealthy and unproductive coping mechanisms just to get by, and this has become their norm. They are either not aware that the environment could be different or are very sceptical that positive change is possible.

The situation won’t be resolved by asking everyone to “just get along”. And it won’t happen overnight. It’s a slower process of rebuilding trust in each other and rebuilding trust that things will improve.

Even with your best intentions, your different leadership style can feel jarring to the team. Anything new, despite being positive, can seem like a threat to their status quo – especially if their previous experience has led them to believe that a happy team and high performance are incompatible. A tired and cynical team will want to see evidence that their efforts will be worthwhile before investing time and energy into change. 

You may hear things like: “We’ve already tried that, and it won’t work because….”. 

Or the lack of trust manifests in a reluctance to take the first step because they are thinking: 

• What if I’m the only one who makes the effort?
• What if we put in effort, and things still don’t change?
• What if we try for a short while, and things go back to how they were?

It’s almost as if the team has reached a deadlock and needs to see a shift somewhere else before they commit to changing themselves.

So you will need to signal that it will be different, for example, by scheduling time to focus on culture, initiating a strategy clarification or reset, and starting with some quick wins.

The only way through is through – the bold leader’s approach 

The turnaround process will undoubtedly involve some hard conversations, uncomfortable moments, and possibly difficult decisions about team structure and make-up. At some point, you’ll find yourself in the “messy middle” – the moment where you’ve identified some of the challenges but only made a little progress, and it feels overwhelming. As you’ve kicked off the process, you have to keep moving forward. The only way through is through.

(Also read: Making Shift Happen: starting your journey to a better team culture) 

And it’s precisely this reason that it takes a courageous leader to embark on the journey of a team turnaround. This daunting task does not turn them off – they head straight towards it.

Here are some of what I’ve seen bold leaders do differently:

1. They address culture sooner rather than later. Culture transformation is at the top of their list as soon as they start in their new role. They recognise that aligning this with a refreshed focus or strategy is the best time to do it. This means the team can discuss their new goals alongside how they will work together to achieve them.
2. They lead with empathy and patience. Because the dysfunction is often more than just “people not getting along”, new leaders listen to understand the tensions and tradeoffs that have led to these problems. Whilst being firm and not tolerating behaviours that are clearly harmful, they wait to gather all information before making their assessments.
3. They are bold in their communications. Bold leaders ask questions they may not like the answers to and don’t avoid difficult conversations or decisions. This is not always pleasant, but they know that maintaining the status quo is worse.
4. They roll up their sleeves with the team. The leaders who are successful in their turnarounds show their team that they’re all in it together. When we work on programmes like this, the leader is in every workshop, they keep the conversation going with their team between our sessions and adopt facilitation principles into their own practice.
5. They balance the macro with the micro. They create a clear image of a positive future state, but understand that the team might not be ready to grasp this straightaway. So they stay committed to making small shifts on the ground to edge them forward, especially when they’re in the “messy middle”.

A plan for turning around a dysfunctional team

As it’s easy to get derailed by other urgent priorities, it helps to create a plan to stay on track.

Understand where you are starting from, list the areas that need improvement, set an overall goal and create a plan to make gradual shifts over time. This might sound a bit full-on for team culture, but this approach will help you stay grounded when you risk being disrupted. When you view this as a distinct project with a roadmap, targets and milestones, it won’t get lost amongst more visible and tangible tasks that your team has to deliver.

We use our five-pillar framework – alignment, cohesion, communication, design, and change – to underpin this process. Although the framework isn’t designed as a step-by-step process, when working with a team that needs to rebuild its culture significantly, we take the first three pillars in order.

Alignment – stepping back to explore the big picture

In a dysfunctional team, people will have been operating in survival mode because they are consumed by the “drama” that surrounds their work. They are taking one day at a time, and it’s difficult to think creatively and strategically.

They are still passionate about their work, but haven’t had the capacity to think beyond “getting things done”. When you provide space to help them reconnect to the purpose of their work and dive deep into the subject matter, you start to reignite that passion.

Team members will often discover they are more aligned on the impact they want to make than they thought, and see how interpersonal issues are getting in the way of that.

Bring the team back to the meaning behind their work and review vision, goals and values, to start restoring motivation and repairing relationships.

Cohesion – understanding different working styles

Building cohesion increases team members’ capacity for uncomfortable and difficult conversations. This will be essential in the “messy middle” of change. However, after a period of dysfunction, their capacity for this will initially be low.

So focus on revealing the individuality of each team member – their working styles, perspectives, expertise they contribute (which may require them to reflect on this for themselves first), so that you can demonstrate the value of differences within your team. 

It may also become more apparent why and where some of the interpersonal conflict has occurred, not necessarily because people have been right or wrong, but because they have seen and approached things differently.  When harnessed and worked through effectively, these points of conflict can be one of the most unique superpowers of your team.

Working through these differences builds trust. Your team can start being more honest and open with each other without it having the same intensity, and you’ll gradually be able to turn up the dial on difficult conversations.

Communication – supercharging your meetings

To rebuild relationships, your team needs more time together, whether in-person or virtual. This helps create familiarity with each other’s communication patterns, mannerisms, and perspectives, and provides opportunities to talk through issues face-to-face.

This means intentionally crafting moments to work through challenges. The foremost opportunity to do this is in your regular meetings, which serve the purpose of both building connections and progressing work. 

Well-designed meetings are containers where a team feels safe to ask questions, give and receive constructive feedback, challenge each other and be vulnerable.

Review the types of meetings your team needs and use facilitation techniques to ensure they are productive and enable everyone to interact.

On the other side – spotting the signals

While the initial stages of transforming a team might feel slow, you’re uncovering the layers gradually and also going at a pace that is workable for the team. You are shifting the underlying structures and behaviours that made the team dysfunctional. You are cultivating more collaboration and resilience for the long-term, rather than papering over the cracks in the short-term.

As a result, these changes can be hard to notice, sometimes imperceptible, and through a challenging transformation process, it’s important to note the small signals you do see. Such as:

• Someone references a conversation from an earlier meeting or workshop about culture to keep each other accountable
• Your team initiates a meeting to problem-solve an ongoing challenge without your involvement
• Someone suggests redesigning a process that isn’t working
• You look back on a big project and realise there were fewer bumps than usual

Although your transformation is never truly done, you’ll eventually start to pick up momentum. Overall, you’ll feel that your team have more confidence in getting better at working together with time and intention. Eventually, you’ll notice that you’re less involved as a leader in dealing with conflict and setbacks, as the team has stepped up to resolve them themselves.

***

When you’re at the start of this process, it can feel daunting – you don’t know how long it will take or be able to predict the exact outcome. The dysfunction didn’t develop overnight, and so it won’t disappear overnight. 

With a bold leadership approach, a sustained effort and a willingness to work through discomfort, you can transform a burnt-out, disengaged team into one that functions well and is supportive. By addressing interpersonal conflict, openly discussing common or frequent challenges, creating better ways of working, and improving systems and structures, your team are set up to perform at a higher level than before.

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As expected, AI and big data feature high on that list. But perhaps more interestingly is what appears in the categories labelled as “working with others”, “self-efficacy” and “cognitive skills”. 

These include:

• Resilience, flexibility and adaptability
• Curiosity and lifelong learning
• Creative thinking
• Leadership and social influence
• Motivation and self-awareness
• Systems thinking
• Empathy and active listening

A clear confirmation, if there ever was one, that we’ll also need to turn up the dial on very human- and relationship-focused capabilities, and the skills that relate to how we work together. 

It also reflects how we’ll have to think differently about teamwork. The same tried-and-trusted models we’ve been using will no longer work when our environment has changed so much.

For example, the famous and influential Tuckman team development model – forming, storming, norming and performing (and later added stage, adjourning) – was developed in the mid-1960s. 

Xerox had released the first commercially available fax machine the previous year (1964), and Peter Drucker hadn’t yet written about the “knowledge economy” (1969). Management thinking was firmly rooted in the industrial era, and the working world seemed much simpler in comparison to today.

Tuckman’s linear four-to-five stage model worked very well for those times. It was functional, robust, and it paved the way for a lot of our foundational understanding of teams – ultimately, that dynamics impacted performance.

The model also helped us grasp that most teams will experience some form of conflict (i.e. the “storming” stage) and it’s less about avoiding it altogether than having strategies to transition through it.

Today’s workplace is far more complex. In its review of the Post-Pandemic Workplace, Gallup demonstrates the level of change we’ve experienced in just the last five years. Amongst the factors are falling employee engagement, navigating increased levels of disruption, a mental health and wellbeing crisis, AI and the evolving role of managers.

This pace of change shows no signs of slowing.

Evolving the team development playbook

So even though teams will form, storm, norm and perform to some degree, we need an approach to team development that is fit for a constantly changing environment. One that is more emergent and agile, caters for nuance and, frankly, a messier backdrop.

We need to shift from team development to team culture development.

While these may seem similar at first glance, there is a subtle difference which leads to a different outcome.

Here’s why.

Coursera defines team development as:

 “…an intentional, ongoing process by an organization to improve the efficiency and progress of a team working toward a common goal or mission. Many team development goals focus on improving the working relationship of team members through improved methods of conflict resolution and communication skills, so that everyone feels understood and valued”.

This is all a vital part of developing team effectiveness. However, team culture development includes an additional layer. 

When we develop culture, we are also creating the container around a team that connects and grounds them as they move through different phases.

To do this, we need to surpass resolving in-the-moment challenges like conflict and communication, and also develop the foundations that define a team’s identity, such as values, principles, systems, processes, routines and rituals.

Amidst high levels of uncertainty and change, this requires a team practice of having regular conversations about ways of working.

And the more this happens, the more a team builds key skills in facilitation, co-creation and managing change as well as the ability to deal with future challenges together.

So, to briefly compare:

Team development supports a team through a current and specific situation or project. It is more reactive, immediate and tactical. Valuable, but also fleeting.

Team culture development includes the above, but is also strategic. It considers the longer-term foundations that support a team now and how they’ll need to operate effectively in the future.

There is nothing wrong with team development, but the future requires an approach that builds resilience and adaptability in a world that is becoming even more unpredictable. That’s what we achieve with team culture development.

With this in mind, some approaches that would benefit from an update include:

• One-off and ad hoc team-building events
• Using one-size-fits-all solutions to address team culture challenges
• Making culture solely the leader’s responsibility
• Operating on autopilot
• Using meetings only for information sharing 
• Taking a reactive approach to culture

Here’s what we can do instead.

Building team culture every day

Team-building activities are often viewed as something that takes place separately from core work. You may organise a special event to encourage colleagues to bond and build trust. The intention is that this will spill over into the day-to-day environment, so working relationships are easier. 

These activities help form social connections and feel like a welcome break from work. But if they are run without any intention to address the root cause of any challenges, they can be perceived as a tick-box exercise. They must be planned thoughtfully and inclusively so they do not feel like “forced fun”, which can backfire. 

It’s also a pretty high expectation that a team will magically transform their working relationships in a single event!

With collaboration becoming increasingly vital, creating cohesive relationships needs to be a core part of working together.

Real team-building doesn’t happen away from work – it happens as we work, when we find opportunities for regular micro-moments of connection.

This could look like ensuring project kickoffs include a “here’s how to work with me” discussion so that team members can share their working and communication preferences, or morning Slack “check-ins” for virtual teams so that everyone feels connected as they start their day.

Measure team culture and track progress over time

High-performing teams make the best of everyone’s diverse expertise, perspectives and backgrounds. This diversity within a team, together with the nature of their work and the context in which they work, makes every team unique.

And so every team will face unique challenges.

If that complexity wasn’t enough, team culture covers a broad range of areas, which can be overwhelming and difficult to know where to start. 

While there are general patterns, themes and trends in team dynamics, what works for one team may not work in the same way for another. There is no one-size-fits-all.

So we need to gather external stimuli, zoom in on a team’s situation and translate this information into a solution that will be most meaningful and impactful for them in a specific given moment.

Firstly, aim to get a snapshot of your current team culture situation, what you need to address and where to focus first.

When we work with teams, we use our framework (alignment, cohesion, communication, design and change) to diagnose their biggest challenges. This way, a team begins their journey with awareness of what is most relevant and important for them.

Secondly, make sure that any training, workshops or sessions include time to reflect and plan next steps. Ensure team members share their insights, actions and commitments to keep moving forward.

Lastly, create a roadmap for improvement. The most sustainable change happens in small, subtle shifts over time, which can be easy to overlook. Review your progress against your initial snapshot so you can see what’s improved and what needs further attention.

Try: take a simplified version of our culture assessment to see the opportunities for your team.

All team members are invested in team culture development

The role of the leader has been evolving for some time. We’ve been shifting from the solo visionary figure who has all the answers towards valuing leaders who can empower their teams to do their best work.

One of my favourite quotes on this is from Linda Hill in Collective Genius: 

“Instead of trying to come up with a vision and make innovation happen themselves, a leader of innovation creates a place–a context, an environment–where people are willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires”.

I’m also noticing another shift that reframes this responsibility. 

While it’s clear that a leader sets the tone for their team – Gallup’s research shows the impact of a manager’s style on engagement – the complexity of leading a diverse team in an ever-changing environment is making it more challenging for one person to stay on top of this.

This means a leader needs to move from being solely responsible for culture to distributing this responsibility across the team. 

Leaders need to aim for a team of culture co-creators who all feel invested in creating a great working environment, rather than a group of “culture consumers”.

Building a high-performing team culture is not something that is done to a team. It’s done with them.

Read: From consumers to co-creators: how to involve your whole team in building team culture

Being intentional about developing team culture

In a world of constant notifications, endless feeds and negative news cycles, it’s easy to have a bias towards reactivity. 

The same can be true in our work environment. We respond immediately to emails, chat messages and real or perceived emergencies, leaving little time for non-urgent but important tasks where we can make an impact doing valuable work.

We need to build spaces for this kind of work because the default doesn’t provide it for us.  This means being intentional about collaboration.

When your team works by default, they are pulled in different directions, which keeps them rooted in the short term. They might run the same ineffective meetings, communicate inconsistently and have no time for focused work.

When your team works by design, they reclaim their time, understand how they operate best together, and ensure they use this knowledge to craft their schedules and rhythms. 

This requires a strategic mindset, using their collective expertise to drive growth and innovation, and setting clear structures for achieving it. 

This can be a breakthrough for teams when they realise they have more agency and control over how they get their work done, rather than being stuck with methods that aren’t effective.

Working by default is out, working by design is in!

Using team meetings as culture touchpoints

When we have a wide choice of tools to share one-way information and updates asynchronously, what could be the true value of bringing colleagues together at the same time, especially if they aren’t co-located?

Our synchronous gatherings can be used to deepen understanding, reflect on nuances, address conflicts, problem-solve, generate ideas, and make sense of challenges and opportunities together in real time.

This means reserving status updates for assigned communication channels and designing our meetings as team culture touchpoints that help us connect, learn from each other, ask questions and create value.

Resource: Gamestorming is one of my go-to resources for workshop and meeting design. Sunni Brown and Dave Gray have an updated edition, coming soon.

***

While it’s clear that technology will continue to impact us in ways we can’t predict, one thing we do have control over is how we work together.

Skills such as resilience, flexibility, adaptability, curiosity and lifelong learning, creative thinking, motivation and self-awareness will remain vital for the workplace. It’s developing these very human skills that will also enable us to respond to uncertainty and change.

Building collaboration for the future workplace requires us to shift our mindset now from reactive “fire-fighting” to proactive “fire-proofing”. We need to go further than tactical and ad hoc solutions to develop our teams.

The pace of change requires us to build strong foundations now, so we’re better prepared to navigate future challenges and opportunities together.

***

Start your team culture development journey with a Team Culture Reset.

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Notes:

1. To view the graphic, ensure you have cookies enabled and scroll down to the section that says “Core Skills 2030”

The post Beyond quick fixes: building collaboration for the future workplace appeared first on Bracket.

Companies are taking employee health more seriously in response to the growing interest across wider society. This includes a broader definition of wellbeing, encompassing everything from fitness and nutrition to coaching and therapy.

It’s clear to see why. Healthy people – physically, mentally and emotionally – mean productivity and high performance. McKinsey reports that investing in employee well-being can generate almost $12 trillion in global economic value.[2]

That’s a lot.

However, with burnout increasing across the working world, what was once seen as a nice-to-have perk is fast becoming an essential strategy to combat rising stress. 

Wellness initiatives are now seen as a core solution to restore and rebalance the energy employees are depleting by getting their work done.

Is “well-being” enough? 

We already know we’re not designed to be in stress states for extended periods. It not only impacts our physical health but also our cognitive function. It’s not great for us or the companies in which we work.

We’re in survival mode when working like this. We narrow our focus to what we deem essential, rather than being in the curious, expansive, exploratory state that helps us to be creative, innovate and thrive.

And, when it comes to thriving, well-being is just one half of the picture. Literally.

Brown et al. (2017) reviewed commonalities across existing definitions of “human thriving” from several research papers to develop the following mega-definition:

“Specifically, human thriving was defined as the joint experience of development and success, which can be realized through effective holistic functioning and observed through the experience of a high level of well-being and a perceived high level of performance.”[3]

(emphasis in bold is mine)

So, we can tap into the expertise of wellbeing and wellness professionals to help employees build strategies for dealing with and recovering from stress.

In addition, we need to look at the other factors that drain energy and prevent people from performing at their best. 

Such as:

• Attending too many pointless and unproductive meetings
• Wasting time trying to find key information or documents
• Lack of meaning or context for their work
• Feeling isolated and disconnected from colleagues
• Not being recognised or appreciated

Addressing these areas can go a long way to improve how people feel at work.

Not sure which areas of your team culture need the most attention? Our Team Culture Diagnostic shows you exactly where to focus first. Take a look here.

Designing team culture for healthy people and a healthy business

Even if reducing workloads is not an immediate option, here are a few ideas to consider that can alleviate stress in other ways. In some cases, they even gain time back for employees to do more of what they do best.

1: Ensure your team has a clear sense of purpose

In busy teams, people are mostly head down in their work, concentrating on checking off their daily tasks. 

We might assume everyone is on the same page and understands the team’s goals, but this may not be true. And if they are not, this can cause deeper problems.

For example, team members may waste time on the wrong things without connecting their daily tasks to the ‘why’ behind their work.

Siloes can start to emerge and work gets duplicated. Or worse, team members produce conflicting work that causes mix-ups and challenges later.

Above all, this lack of context can lead team members to question whether their work is truly making a difference. And as Daniel Pink demonstrated in his book Drive, purpose is one of the three key drivers of motivation for knowledge workers.[4]

What to do: Schedule regular big-picture thinking sessions to help individuals connect their tasks and contributions to the higher-level purpose and goals of the team. This helps with focus and prioritisation and even allows team members to influence the direction of their work, bringing more agency, engagement and accountability.

2: Create opportunities for colleagues to connect during work time

Naturally, a cohesive team works better together.

When people understand and appreciate each other’s differences, communication flows easily, and they deal with conflict more effectively and quickly. Where trust, psychological safety and respect exist, people feel valued and connected to their team.

However, we often schedule the social time that builds this environment outside core work hours. We label these activities “team-building” and separate them from what we deem “real” work.

If cohesion is so vital to a positive atmosphere, shouldn’t we craft intentional moments within our work to make this happen?

What to do: Co-design some light social rituals intended for connection and relationship-building (but be careful not to make it “forced fun”). 

It could be a regular open question posted in a Slack channel, a check-in at the start of a meeting, or even a full meeting format you create. You might do something to de-brief and celebrate the end of a project or a collective achievement. 

Think: “How can we understand a little bit more about each other so we can work well together?”

3: Build methods and processes to facilitate progress

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer found a surprisingly simple way for managers to help their direct reports have better days: remove barriers to progress.

In The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work, the authors found that managers tend to overestimate aspects such as recognition and tangible incentives for their direct reports, and overlook the impact of making “progress in meaningful work” on generating positive emotions.[5]

For example, based on a research study of 2000 people by Lucid, a software firm, 53% of employees waste up to two hours per day trying to find information they need to do their work.[6] That’s up to a day a week that could be spent on more productive (and enjoyable) tasks by creating a more organised system.

What to do: Listen out for common frustrations across your team, and gather regular feedback to identify any bottlenecks they face. 

Use group brainstorming and design thinking methods to find solutions for the biggest pain points first. This could include auditing team meetings and tweaking formats to make them more engaging and productive. 

This process also shifts your team from working by default to a more proactive and design-led approach. 

4: Build the foundations and capacity for change now so that you stay grounded through change

If there’s one thing we’ve collectively learned over the past five years, it’s that we never know what’s on the horizon. Change and uncertainty are becoming more of a feature in our working lives.

While unexpected events can be unsettling, upend your team’s workloads and create more stress, you have no control over how and when they happen. So we need to build our capacity and approach to dealing with them.

By building foundations and structures that support your team and keep you grounded through change, you can reduce the time it takes you to bounce back from disruption.

This is future-proofing your team culture.

What to do: consider your team culture a muscle that you keep exercising and building. Continue to strengthen your working methods, even when things are going well. 

Develop routines and rituals that can create a sense of stability and familiarity when everything around you feels uncertain and chaotic.

Regularly reviewing and discussing your team’s habits sets you up to perform highly and at the same time builds skills and mindset for dealing with change.

A radical idea: Can work be energy-giving?

There will always be stressful seasons and periods at work, and addressing the above areas won’t make you immune. But it will lessen their negative impact and give you the tools to work through them. 

Your team will feel valued and supported in other ways, bringing more enjoyment, connection and productivity to their work. 

And then there comes an even more radical idea…that work can give us energy rather than drain us. 

Because we’re:

• Doing fulfilling work that we are proud of
• Making good use of our expertise
• Seeing the impact we’re having
• Regularly removing blockers to progress
• Building productive and positive relationships with our colleagues

Designing and leading our team culture with intention leads to better well-being and high performance. We create environments that are optimised for learning, connecting and growth.

Because that’s the key to avoiding burnout in the first place: creating a positive working environment where employees can do their best work.

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References:

1. Corporate Wellness Market Size, Share, and Trends 2025 to 2034. Precedence Research (2025)

2. Thriving workplaces: How employers can improve productivity and change lives. McKinsey (2025)

3. Human Thriving: A Conceptual Debate and Literature Review. Brown et al. (2017)

4. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Daniel Pink (2011)

5. The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work. Teresa Amabile & Steven Kramer (2011)

6. Half of workers waste two hours per day looking for stuff. Personnel Today (2025)

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When a senior team is aligned on a future vision and ensures that the work of their teams and departments is joined-up and connected across the company, it improves efficiency, provides space for more value creation and ensures they are well-prepared to respond quickly to emerging challenges.

All major factors in sustaining and achieving ongoing success. 

But it can be challenging to make this happen in practice. Many organisations miss critical opportunities to get their senior team working as a well-oiled machine. Instead siloes emerge, bottlenecks and confusion occur, and at worst, this leads to conflict and unhealthy competition that slows progress.

Here are five key areas to focus on to develop a high-performing senior team that drives measurable results.

Building alignment

The foundation of any strong senior team culture is alignment, ensuring every team member has a common understanding of the company’s strategy, and contributes to its future direction by sharing their own, and their teams’, insights, knowledge and expertise.

This alignment is achieved through structured and focused discussions to establish clarity, set goals and create agreement around practical actions.

CASE STUDY: Here’s how we achieved a 46% increase in alignment for this senior team.

Strengthening cohesion

A high-performing senior team develops a strong trust, good relationships and open communication. There is a clear team identity and understanding of how it enables company growth. Each person understands and respects the expertise of every other senior team member and the work they oversee.

This requires both self-awareness of individual contributions and curiosity about others’, and open discussions to identify commonalities, differences and how the team can utilise them. 

Establishing good communication

With a clear understanding of their collective responsibility, a senior team can then identify what information they need from each other to be effective. They can outline the frequency and type of discussions – both operational and strategic – that support effective decision-making and maintain momentum. This clarity enables them to identify opportunities for collaboration and to create value within and across their teams.

Creating systems by design

Smart senior teams consider what they need to put in place to operate at their best. They are deliberately proactive about designing systems and processes that support alignment and decision-making, provide visibility of key information, track progress and keep them collectively accountable.

Responding to change

With open communication and trust, high-performing senior teams can be agile and responsive in an uncertain and changing environment. They can mobilise quickly to solve problems, identify resources across their teams and take rapid action. They trust each other to experiment and take small risks to stay relevant. As a result, they continue to learn together and strengthen their effectiveness as a team.

Developing your senior team as a true collaborative unit with a strong identity has an impact throughout the entire organisation. It trickles down to the teams and departments they lead, creates a more consistent experience for employees, and ensures more alignment, trust, clarity and shared purpose across the business.

It’s a valuable investment that results in a more resilient and responsive business.

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Just a few years ago, we weren’t thinking about topics like hybrid and remote setups, flexible working, multigenerational workforces, and creating inclusive workplaces as much as we are now. These factors have all significantly impacted how we interact and work together.

Yet, the way we develop our teams hasn’t caught up. We still use traditional approaches like ad-hoc team-building sessions and one-off away days. This is like doing a one-time 7-hour gym session and hoping it keeps you fit and healthy for the rest of the year.

To build teams that thrive for the long term, we need approaches that match the needs of our current times. This means moving from treating team culture development as an afterthought or a byproduct of our work to bringing it to the forefront of how we get work done. When we shift team-building from a separate event to embedding it within our work, we learn together and connect more every day.

That’s much easier said than done, so here are three ideas that could help:

1. Think more strategically about team culture
2. Encourage your team to become culture co-creators
3. Use collective problem-solving as a team-building activity

1. Think more strategically about team culture

Having a tactical approach to building team culture isn’t bad, per se. It’s much better than doing nothing at all. Examples might be the one-time team-building sessions that I mentioned above. It could also be that cool ritual you heard of another team doing, or a meeting format you read about that you want to try. These can form a valuable part of an overall strategy.

But when these methods are random and unrelated to what you’re trying to achieve as a team, you’ll miss out on getting real, long-lasting results and valuable learning opportunities.

To take it up a level, match your desired culture to your business goals and then consider the activities and behaviours that connect the two. From here, explore your skills and capabilities gaps, and build them into a team development plan to guide the training and learning you’ll do. This will get more buy-in and engagement from your team because they’ll be able to see the ‘why’ behind these activities.

2. Encourage your team to become culture co-creators

While it’s important for a leader to set the environment for high performance and collaboration, every team member impacts the culture, whether they are fully aware of this or not.

So, when we shift everyone towards becoming co-creators in building and sustaining a healthy team culture, they take an active role in shaping a better environment for themselves and their colleagues, not just leaving this activity to those who are most senior in the team.

This shift is significant because your team starts to build ownership and accountability for how you work together and a collective mindset for continuous improvement. Through exploring better ways of working, they’ll have live opportunities to practice critical thinking, facilitation and managing change. This moves them from working by default -just accepting how things are – to working by design and being more intentional about how they interact, communicate, and create systems and processes to ensure everyone can do their best work.

3: Use collective problem-solving as a team-building activity

A team will always face new challenges, and the key to thriving is not to try to avoid them completely. It’s to use them as an opportunity to strengthen your culture. Collective and proactive problem-solving around something affecting your team today is the best kind of team-building activity. It is real, relatable and builds your team as you work together.

As the adage goes, “a problem shared is a problem halved”. Just an open discussion can bring your team together, build cohesion and identify learning moments. Often, difficulties that team members thought were individual to them are characteristics of their work and environment and are experienced by others, too. When your team articulates these issues, it helps them to connect around a common challenge.

Then, you can have productive conversations about how to move forward, considering what’s in and out of your control as a team. You can either work to fix the ‘bugs’ that shouldn’t be there (like conflicts or broken processes) or reframe the ‘features’ that you can’t change immediately (like other teams, or the wider organisational culture).

As a result, your team builds confidence, resilience and problem-solving skills, which sets them up to solve future challenges more effectively as they appear.

The future long-term health of our teams requires us to think differently about culture, and when we are intentional about this, we set ourselves up for the best chance of success.

These three methods – thinking strategically about team culture, becoming culture co-creators and using collective problem-solving as a team-building method – integrate team-building into actual work rather than leaving it as a separate activity. Your team will be in constant learning as they explore better ways to work together.

Our Team Culture Diagnostic brings teams together to kickstart their culture journey and learn about the key factors of high-performing teams. Get in touch to discuss how it can help.

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