Early-stage career development in technical roles is driven by developing the ability to deliver more and more complex solutions. If you increase your technical skills, have basic professionalism, and are reasonably productive, that is usually enough to propel you upward in seniority. But there may come a day when this formula ceases to be so simple. You will need to do more. You will need to become a leader in an area outside of your technical expertise.
Senior technical people can help lead teams in many ways. They can focus on strategic vision, organizational structure, hiring, training plans, etc. But the most important and the most accessible option is to lead the team culture. You can lead team culture at any seniority, but as a senior member of the team, you must lead team culture.
Culture is easy to say, but hard to define. Culture exists at many levels from the individual all the way up through organizational hierarchies and even as a national identity. The experience of culture is personal. Your own values can flow up and influence the larger groups you belong to or organizational values can flow downwards and influence your personal feelings. Cultural values are the strongest when there is alignment between the levels. Lack of alignment can destroy group culture. Reaching alignment is a personal process. You will interpret organizational values in a way that makes sense for you.
The first step to becoming a culture leader is to understand the espoused values in your environment. This starts with yourself. While your own values may feel intuitive, forcing yourself to write them out will help you better define and articulate them. Repeat this process up the chain of values that you live and work in. Take those values and interpret them in your own words. This process will help establish your ownership of the ideals.
Next, put your interpretation of the culture into daily practice. This is usually more lived than said. You may never explicitly say that “we should do this because it is a part of our culture.” You will bring forth cultural values through your actions.
Individuals, teams, and companies will inevitably stray from their values at some point. Cultural leadership is recognizing when this is happening and taking action to course-correct it. There is a wide chasm between seeing a wrong and acting to correct that wrong. Leaders act to maintain the cultural values of their team.
I realize that this is all a bit vague without specific examples, so let me provide a few. Let’s say that you are part of a team with a high-performance and professional team culture. A proactive way to support this culture could be to call out your own performance misses. This gives the team an opportunity to support you and to address the challenges. You are exposing yourself by sharing an area of weakness. Vulnerability like this takes courage. This style of leadership creates an environment where your colleagues will feel safe sharing their own shortcomings instead of hiding them away. A reactive example is speaking up when one of your teammates is talking down to a subordinate. It will feel uncomfortable, but it is better than the quiet discomfort that the team will feel if the behavior goes unchecked. It doesn’t take many instances of behavior outside of what’s accepted to erode the culture. Real-world culture isn’t what’s written down, it is what people do.
It is a lot of work to understand and personalize culture. It is scary to be vulnerable and confront your colleagues. There better be a worthwhile payoff.
A Team benefits in many ways from a strong culture. Culture creates clarity. Clarity builds trust. If I know how I am expected to act and when I act that way I receive the expected response, I don’t have to worry or spend a lot of time thinking about what to do. A consistent team is an efficient team. A team with inconsistent behavior loses productivity to waste. There is no business value in worrying about how your perspective will be received. A strong culture empowers people to act autonomously. When there isn’t direct leadership present or the team encounters an ambiguous situation, cultural values enable decentralized decision-making. Team managers should love this as it frees them up to focus on higher-level strategy. On a team with a strong culture, leadership can be dispersed throughout the members of the team. People will buy in when they have clarity, can make decisions, and feel part of a shared set of values. No matter the task, a team with a strong culture is a better place to work.
There are individual benefits for you if you take on the mantle of a culture leader. It takes a demonstration of courage to lead culture. Your courage will earn you the respect of your peers. People want to work with colleagues they respect. Culture is a language spoken at every level of an organizational hierarchy. A fluency in culture leadership will help you engage in conversations with organizational leaders. At the end of the day, the culture of a team represents the character of the team manager. Your contribution to a strong team culture supports your manager and connects you to their objectives. Making your manager look good is usually good for you as well.
Taking on the responsibility of culture leadership will make your team more successful and a better place to work. Understanding and protecting team culture will develop your professional skills and help you advance your career.