• Create opportunities for the team to come together to share and learn experiences that bring them closer to their goals
• Remember to analyse any issues from a system perspective rather than blaming individuals for things that haven’t gone quite according to plan
• Encourage open and equal contribution

• Understand that the organisation is a system, not simply a collection of individuals. This means understanding how all the working parts fit together and reviewing and enabling the system as a whole. This can be difficult where there has traditionally been a prevalent hierarchical or blame culture but careful evaluation of the conditions that individuals exist under, together with processes that make it easy for them to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong thing ,can be helpful
• Build psychological safety within the team. Psychological safety exists when nothing you say or do will be used against you as long as you mean well. Essentially it is a trust that exists between all members of a team that promotes their ability to grow and become their best selves. Remember that achieving safety is not always comfortable, but magic doesn’t happen in the comfort zone. We have to stretch ourselves in order to progress, otherwise we stay as we are. But this has to happen in a positive context, without any evidence of malevolence.

Safety is not the same as comfort

Whether you’re talking about the gym or a team environment, the following hold true:

To build psychological safety the required behaviours need to be encouraged within the whole team, not just in a top-down fashion. Encourage feedback, be authentic, look for learning opportunities, questions, non-judgemental sharing of struggles and mistakes. Don’t ignore anyone, take things personally, punish suggestions that don’t work, dismiss any contributions, or get agitated.

Remember that everyone is approaching their life with a positive intent – always actively look for it.

• Arrange an opportunity to agree a shared purpose across the whole team. When we talk about a shared purpose we do not mean a shared sense of what we do, or why we do it, but of why it’s important to us collectively (watch Simon Sinek ‘Start with Why’)
• Help people think beyond their immediate actions towards that greater purpose
• Understand the problems you are trying to solve, then build a clear picture of what good looks like
• Encourage open discussion – to explore all alternative solutions to any issue, to honestly appraise the pros, cons and trade-offs required for any particular course of action chosen
• Be prepared to keep revisiting and re-articulating both vision and goals to ensure clarity of understanding and commitment across the whole team (particularly important when new team members join)

A positive culture is one in which the environment is collaboratively crafted and nurtured to enable all members to flourish. Unfortunately, more often than not, culture in general practice is aligned with hierarchical structures which does not enable positivity.

The good news is that, with sufficient will, organisations can create a different way of being, a new sense of ‘how things get done around here’. It’s not easy or quick, and requires all members to be involved, but it is definitely possible and ultimately worthwhile because culture eats pretty much everything else for breakfast. It trumps all.

Organisational culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch & dinner

Real teams with a positive, progressive, learning culture all share the same characteristics:

• They have clear shared objectives
• They have an ability to work interdependently
• They create regular opportunities to meet and regularly review and improve performance

The benefits of this are that both colleague and client satisfaction levels rise, with greater colleague engagement leading to lower levels of errors, stress, injury, sickness absence, intention to quit and turnover. Plus, we see a reduction in bullying and harassment from both colleagues and clients.

The culture of a team is everyone’s responsibility. It cannot be imposed; it needs to be agreed and nurtured by all team members.