Something’s off. People aren’t talking. They’re working in silos. Engagement is falling fast, and miscommunications are on the rise. It’s one of the most challenging situations a manager can encounter: a bad team culture.

Here’s the bad news: it’s not going to fix itself. As the manager, you’re responsible for creating, managing, and recreating the team culture as needed.

The good news? There are so many simple, effective things you can do to get your team’s culture back on track. 

Here are my top 5 tips for building a strong team culture:

Call it out

This might be the last thing you want to do –– after all, having a less-than-great team culture doesn’t really create an atmosphere for sharing and trust. But I promise you that letting things fester is worse. Call a meeting and lay it all out on the table. Talk about how the team culture hasn’t been what anybody wants it to be. And then ask the team to brainstorm ideas about how to fix it. I’m always a fan of doing this together on flip charts if you possibly can, but doing it remotely via a doc works too.

Create consistency

Teams thrive when they know what to expect. Schedule in consistent activities for team culture-building, and make sure they always happen. Think: things like a weekly team meeting, quarterly happy hour, yearly off-site. It’s easy to let these things slide when you get busy, but don’t give into that temptation. These things are just as important as any of the other work you do, because they ensure that you can do that work well.

Give people space to form organic connections

Many people hate traditional icebreakers, so if you try to force your team through those week after week, you may end up doing more harm than good. Instead, use tried and true team builders, and be sure to create lots of space for forming organic connections too. Things like coffee tastings or bagel bars often work well for this. Anything you can do that puts people in a room with each other and gives them the opportunity to chat is a good thing!

You may also want to see how you can encourage mentor-mentee relationships among your team members. You can go for the traditional manager-team member set up, but I’d encourage you to think outside the box and let people form these relationships organically among themselves as well. You never know whose skill sets and needs are going to align!

Revamp your team meetings

Team meetings are usually the worst part of everybody’s week (managers included!), but they can be such a valuable opportunity for culture-building, if you know how to do them right. Instead of going with the traditional meeting structure, make meetings collaborative. Give everybody a job to do in the meeting, or a part of the meeting. You can even do a rotation, or a lottery for who gets what job each week to keep things interesting.

One really effective culture-builder for meetings is the weekly shout-out. It sounds cheesy, but if you end every meeting with a time where people can give shout-outs to their teammates, calling out good behavior and celebrating wins together, it goes such a long way in building culture. Plus it makes meetings way more enjoyable, since everybody leaves on a high note! (Want more training for running great meetings? Check this out.)

When in doubt, bring food.

Bagels, doughnuts, salad bar, coffee or tea flights, cocktails, whatever’s a fit for your team, bring it. Food always brings people together, and the act of eating with each other is an easy way to foster a sense of community. 

Creating a strong team culture is so important, and it really can start with something as simple as a box of bagels and lox. So make sure you’re taking the time to focus on this critical element for engagement and retention! And as always, if you’d like some support while you’re working on it, I’m here to help! Find out how I help managers build great team culture here.

Many of us work in a hurried, reactive environment. We tactically respond to what's coming at us each week, each day, even by the hour, like the game of Whack-a-Mole. The pace is not sustainable. This approach is causing exhaustion for managers and even for our most engaged team members. 

I hear from managers about the disorder that happens in the workplaces. They are tired, bewildered, and don’t know how to fix the system that they created or in some cases inherited. While doing the great work of delivering client projects, helping earn new business we sometimes forget the critical work of developing a team and sustainable systems to make the work and workplace thrive. So, we live in this place of antiquated systems, tools, processes and wonder how to unravel this ball of yarn, but then another client deliverable is due and the job of working on the team is set aside.

I know the place that you’re in, and the feeling of overwhelm. 

You might be managing from a reactive stance if some of these situations sound familiar;

• News among the team, and the company, often travels through the grapevine and rarely comes from management.

• Some people are in the know about important company info, while others, who are equally qualified, remain unaware. This causes discontent but let me point out that it also causes equity and proximity issues. 

• The team is not aligned on priorities.

• Team members may struggle with loneliness or lack of connection individually or with each other.

• The work feels transactional, and employees feel like a cog in the wheel of a big production with little personal benefit.

In an impulsive environment, we can fail to communicate important details with our team. This leaves employees, managers, directors, and even senior leaders occasionally in a confused dark space and often leads to frustration at its best, and active employee disengagement at its worst. If you’re familiar with the eNPS score, actively disengaged team members are considered “detractors”. They are actively not promoting your workplace. In fact, usually, they are actively complaining about it to their friends, neighbors, in line at the coffee shop, and those complaints are like poison to coworkers. Very few companies can withstand a trend of actively disengaged employees.

Here’s the bad news: the outside world might not get any less chaotic any time soon.

But the good news is that you can create a calm, stable work environment anyway by proactively leading your team. Sounds great ... but who has the time for that?

I get it, making this kind of change to move away from chaos can feel like one more overwhelming thing in a long list of overwhelming things. And I’m not going to lie, this kind of change does take a lot of effort upfront. But it pays off in stability, consistency, innovation, and performance.

(And just in case that’s not convincing enough for you, if you don’t make these changes, you’re creating an unsustainable future for your team and risk employee dissatisfaction, productivity, and regrettable turnover.)

The key to success? Consistency.

I’ve noticed in two decades as an HR professional that the teams and leaders who harness a methodical, intentional approach to communicating and leading a team have stability in their workforce. Consistency is the key. Identify how you want to lead and manage your team and stick with it.

And if you do nothing else, host a regular team meeting.

It’s not that this will magically solve your problems overnight, but you have to start somewhere, and I recommend implementing an effective team meeting. If you're not already hosting a team meeting, start with a consistent and dependable one. Or, if you have one but it feels stale or fruitless, reinvent it.

The benefits of a healthy, transparent, and dependable team meeting are palpable, here are a few from my experience working with mid-sized businesses:

• Connections thrive among the whole team  

• Team members develop a strong level of trust in their manager that they are knowledgeable about the happenings in the business

• Together, teams can solve problems, it’s not just for the manager and the individual who has the problem

• Brainstorming power multiplies in team meetings   

• Employees report feeling a sense of belonging

• Crosstraining and employee development thrive  

Above all: do not cancel your team meeting! 

The meeting can only work if you actually have the meeting!

Even if your agenda feels light, and you simply come together to bond, and follow through on your promise of hosting a team meeting, that’s a win. Don’t be the manager who cancels the meeting at the last very last second, or shows up and says, “Well, we don’t really have anything on the agenda this week, so...” Set a proactive agenda to effectively communicate important information with your team. It’s a simple, wide-reaching, and effective way to infuse stability and tip your culture in a positive direction.

Not sure whether your team meetings are worth the time? (Or maybe you’re pretty sure they are not?)

I’m here to help.

Check out my on-demand course, Building Blocks to an Effective Team Meeting. It’ll set you up for success with a downloadable course agenda and the exact components to include in your regular team meeting agenda.

Running the Manager Training Series is one of my very favorite things to do ... but I’m not going to lie, this cohort last year had me at the brink.

We were talking about department meetings in general, and they had sooooo many questions.

• ​What would I include and not include?

• Who should run the meeting?

• Should they have a prepared agenda?

• Should the manager hosting the meeting be the only one talking?

• Is a team builder or icebreaker even necessary for an established team?

• What about notes or minutes, if yes, who should take them?

• And, on and on...

This line of questioning went on into delirium. But it did make me ponder their dilemma. Learning about the higher-level stuff was great. But they also wanted to know precisely how I would structure a departmental meeting if I were hosting one.

By the end of the line of questions, it was clear that they wanted my EXACT FORMULA for an effective team meeting. And, friends, this is how The Ideal Team Meeting​ formula was incubated. 

Later that day, I scratched out my ideas and added them to our private LinkedIn group. You know what? It worked! 

The next week a participant said, ​"​Hey Amy​,​ I tried your ideal team meeting format and it worked! Starting with that team builder that you recommended the format worked for my team.​"​ 

Thanks to this cohort, I’ve been deliberating on making more guides like this for SIX MONTHS. Over winter break, I recorded an on-demand that answers the question of exactly what you should include, how, and why. This also led me to plan a series of related classes that will support your curiosity in taking a deeper dive into some management tactics that we talk about at a high level during the ​M​anager ​T​raining ​S​eries.

And now, I’m very pleased to announce that Building Blocks to an Effective Team Meeting is ready and available for you to make your meetings that much better.

I’ve tested this with a few clients, and here is what one of them had to say:

"The Building Blocks to an Effective Team Meeting course hit the spot in terms of giving both conceptual and actionable guidance to address my current needs. I'm adopting The Ideal Team Meeting Agenda and adapting it to meet the needs of my senior leader meeting."

— David Weiner, CEO, Social Studies School Service

So if you’ve ever been in a meeting that’s less than great (or run one yourself!) check it out!

Is your team stalled or continuously experiencing mishaps or dysfunction? Managers leading teams that experience repetitive 'issues' often feel battered and unable to right the ship. The first step is to understand what is causing the dysfunction among your team and then get to work correcting it. Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team gives us an excellent roadmap to correct the dysfunction and cultivate strong teams. Whether you have significant issues or a few small burdens, these insights will help. 

In his book, Lencioni identifies that the five dysfunctions include:

1. Absence of trust—Unwilling to be vulnerable within the team.

2. Fear of conflict— Artificial harmony, not discussing real issues, conflict avoidance, unwillingness to speak up or listen.

3. Lack of commitment—Not involving team members in decision-making. Team members may be silent, but silence doesn’t necessarily mean agreement.

4. Avoidance of accountability—An unwillingness to hold each other accountable resulting in mediocracy instead of excellence. Team members duck the responsibility to call peers or superiors out on counterproductive behavior, which lowers the bar.

5. Inattention to results—Focusing on personal success, status, and ego before team success.          

How do you build these capabilities among your team? While each team will be at various stages of development, here are some ideas that we have accumulated that can help grow these capabilities for your team.

1. Absence of Trust. Look for ways to model vulnerability among your team. One example is to include sharing opportunities during team meetings, such as an icebreaker asking: What was your biggest failure in the last month, quarter, or year. Be prepared for some awkward silence but hold out until one person on your team is brave and willing to share their failure first. Then, be ready to share yours too. This is an easy but important trust-building activity for teams. 

2. Fear of Conflict. Artificial harmony looks like an unwillingness to share a counter opinion at a team meeting or in a 1:1. On the contrary, having a healthy debate and then a willingness to pick a direction and the whole team gets on board. How can you cultivate healthy conflict? First, practice having conflict on your team and then recognize teammates who willingly debate or offer a counter perspective. In your next team meeting practice conflict by debating first a fictitious situation such as which ice cream flavor is the best, pitting people/teams against each other. Other ideas are local favorite restaurants, and coffee shops (Starbucks vs. Dunkin, etc.). Then, practice with a real-life situation that you preselect. This type of debate is invaluable for the team. Regular practice will help the team get better and be more productive when real situations come up, and passionate debate is imperative to success. 

3. Lack of Commitment. When making a decision as a team, silence is not agreement. Leaders need to be careful not to accept silence as agreement. Silence will provide surface-level agreement, and then team members will grumble in the hallway after they have left the meeting. Instead, encourage an active dialog before making a decision. People need to weigh in to be bought into a decision or concept. Brene Brown Ph.D. is an American research professor, lecturer, author, and incredible podcast host. She shares on her podcast that she often holds blind votes in her team meetings to prevent the first person from swaying the others and creating a popular opinion. Also, that prevents the leader's opinion from unfairly influencing others. A blind sticky note vote on which direction you’ll be going on a decision is not a bad idea, even on Zoom.  

4. Avoidance of Accountability. This goes both ways, managers sometimes fail to be accountable to their team members, and team members sometimes fail to be accountable as well. In 1:1 meetings, are you asking for deadlines from your team members and then holding them to it? When can I expect to have that report in my inbox? Get a date and follow-up if the report is not done on time. At the same time, managers sometimes fail to follow through on their commitments; is anyone behind on quarterly or annual reviews? Make a point to get good at accountability by setting reminders, tracking deadlines, and bravely following up if things slide. Good management hygiene is a strong indicator of great leadership. 

5. Inattention to Results. Team results have to come before the individual or personal outcomes. While one salesperson could be having record sales, the production team could be swamped as a result, causing the brand to falter. The whole team has to work together and be focused on overall results, not simply individual results. 

Next steps?

After reading this identify the top 1-2 dysfunctions, your team may need to cultivate and begin implementing a plan to develop skills in this area. 

Building Strong Teams - Training Opportunity:

Want to cultivate your skills of Building a Strong Team? Sign-up for the training series Building Strong Teams. This four-part training series will help leaders develop competencies to cultivate a strong team. Apply here.