Speaker 1: Positive company culture doesn't come from perks, it doesn't come from benefits, it comes from one place and one place only. Positive teams. Hey leader, David Berkus here, organizational psychologist, author of four best-selling books on helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. And in this episode, we're going to talk about how to build a positive team culture. Look, there's been a lot that has been written and said in the last decade about the importance of positive organizational culture, about the importance of shaping an organizational culture that isn't toxic, that helps people be prolific and healthy. But a lot of leaders have put their faith in the wrong places to build that positive organizational culture. The first place they look that's potentially the wrong place is perks and benefits, right? So they look at what can we do to add increased flexibility, work from home options, maybe we can add a gym to the office or a cafeteria, do free food on certain days. Nobody's going to say no to the free food or the free gifts. But what we know after two decades of looking at companies that tried the perks and benefits process is that it doesn't consistently deliver results in a positive organizational culture. But the reason that people are looking in the wrong place when it comes here is that most employees' experience of work is shaped almost entirely by the team that they are on. It's not about organizational culture. It's about teaming. And if you teach the leaders of every team to build a positive team culture, you will inevitably build a positive organizational culture, whether you've got a gym on site or not. So in this episode, we're going to look at four things team leaders can do to shape a positive team culture that will eventually lead to a positive organizational one. The first thing team leaders need to do to build a positive team culture is to foster connections, foster real social connections between individual members of the team. There's a wealth of research that suggests that people who have friends at work are more engaged, they call in sick less often, they're more productive, they have longer tenures in the organization. A lot of positive things happen when people have social connections at work. Sarah Pressman at the University of California, for example, found that the probability of an early death is 70% greater for people with poor social connections. That's triple the number for obese people and almost double the number for people with low social connections. The other thing that fostering social connections does, and this is why I think it spreads to a larger positive organizational culture, is that it reinforces a mentality that the team is more important than any individual talented member. Perks and benefits, while they can send a message that people are appreciated, also send a subtle message that we're doing this because you individually are top. Top talent. Whereas fostering social connections and putting the emphasis on team emphasizes that you need the team to express your top talent and turn it into performance. And that makes for longer, more sustainable performance excellence, and it also makes for a positive team. The second way to build a positive team culture is to show empathy. True, authentic empathy as a leader to a team and hopefully eventually from team members to each other. Empathy is key for a team to understand not only each other's strengths and weaknesses, but also how they're going to handle themselves – not just from their substance, but their backgrounds, commonalities, potential pitfalls , and also places where they can be trusted to run with the ball without dropping it. Again, that's what students need, at least as a leader. And that's what et 팀 is. In addition, research stiff from Jane Dutton at the University of Michigan showed that leaders who empathize more with her people build a greater sense of both individual and team-wide resilience when times are tough. Tree of English The facts now extend to members of our county. It is inevitable that teams are going to face these difficult times. That some projects are going to be more than they think they can accomplish. All of their local events will وال that some projects will not be more challenging, stingy than some students even. But now it sound like they can focus onائ the Justiahmat. Noch will learn a lot from society, that, when all other 개 imagination gets have setbacks and that situational and environmental factors are going to make it harder to do their work. And when you need to tap into that team-wide resilience, having a reservoir of demonstrated empathy, not only from the leader, but empathy across the whole team is what's going to be key to building that resilience, getting through that tough time, and getting back to great performance. The third way to build a positive team culture is to offer help. My friend and the brilliant researcher Heidi Grant has a whole body of research suggesting that people don't actually ask for help as often as they need. In fact, one of the biggest reasons they don't is they assume that people can see that need for help, but they can't. And it takes a leader to demonstrate what it looks like when people need help and also what offers of help look like. So be ready to offer help in a myriad of situations as your team talks about what they're working on next, what they're focused on, what they've accomplished, maybe whatever roadblocks stand in their way, be willing to offer help. In addition, research from Jonathan Hyatt at New York University suggests that leaders who are self-sacrificing, who are not only offering help, but are taking the time to roll up their sleeves and do tasks that maybe aren't part of their job description, but are actually part of their people's job description because their people need help, those leaders foster a culture that is reciprocal in that help. It's a positive cycle between offering help, self-sacrificing, and having people willing to self-sacrifice and offer help for the rest of the team. And as a result, that combined with empathy, like we talked about before, creates a team that is there for each other, that is supportive of each other, that is resilient, and that over time wins much more often because of that support and resiliency. And the last way to build a positive team culture is to encourage candor. And this one may seem counterintuitive, right? We might think that positivity means that we're in denial about reality when setbacks happen or people are actually playing from a place of their weaknesses when failures happen. But a myriad of research from people like Amy Edmondson at Harvard University show that building a sense of psychological safety on a team doesn't increase the number of mistakes. It increases the learning that happens from mistakes, and it increases over time the sense of positivity on a team. Psychological safety is the ability to express oneself fully at work, the ability to admit when we screwed up, the ability to ask for help, which is something we talked about before as something that's missing from a lot of teams. And psychological safety is also the difference between whether a team actually taps into the best solution or not. People have different ideas on the team. People have suggestions for how other team members could get better. And if they're not speaking from a place of candor, then those things are being self-censored and the entire team suffers as a result. A side note here, this also means being willing to be vulnerable as a leader. You're not going to get candor among the entire team if you're not willing to go first. And if you're not willing to go first, then you're not going to get candor. Demonstrate that this is a safe place to talk about our own individual problems and our own individual failings. If you do that, if you show candor, not only by being honest with people when they need it, but by being honest about your own faults and your own setbacks as well, you'll be well on your way to building a positive team culture. Now, as we already said, what's missing from this list are perks and benefits. This isn't about having a cafe in the lobby where people can get free coffee. Although if that's done in the service of fostering social connections, that's okay. But if you're not willing to go first, then you're not willing to go first. And if you're This isn't about planning lavish, expensive off-sites and team building activities. Although if those things help with empathy and candor, they're okay. This is about the regular habits of a team. Positive team cultures don't happen overnight. They take time and the compounding of a lot of different actions, both as the individual and the leader. So these four actions are going to take time to turn the climate around on a team. But when you do them consistently, they will compound. And if more and more teams in the organization start to do them consistently, that will compound. And over time, those positive team cultures will turn into a positive organizational culture, a place in the entire organization where people feel like they can be their best selves, a place where people feel like they can work on projects that exhilarate and also grow them, a place where people feel like they can do their best work ever. And by the way, if you're building a positive team culture, you probably want to also build a high-performing team. So you're going to watch this video here on what high-performing teams do differently. That way. Watch it with your team, actually.