Balancing people and business is a very real hurdle for leaders who care about employee happiness and engagement, and are also driven to achieve ambitious results.
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.
Subscribe for regular insights on making culture-building a team habit.