brass tacks for turning morale boosters into culture boosters
Team vibes seem low?
Everyone is waiting on you to fix it. As a leader, your job is to be the thermostat not the thermometer.
Previously, I wrote about the difference between morale and culture, and how to boost morale while also linking these moves to mission fulfillment. The happy coincidence is that the moves used by the best leaders to proactively create a positive culture are also the best moves for reversing a negative trend in team vibe:
Institutional triggers for enhancing morale that are connected to
high performance and mission achievement.
The best way to do this is to pre-plan how and when you’re going to celebrate as a team.
- Monthly/quarterly (outcomes-focused): How do you celebrate when something important, mission-critical is achieved?
- Weekly: What rituals do you have for celebrating good moves people made over the past week that, when scaled and repeated, will lead to success on the big milestones?
- Daily/hourly: What are you doing to call out the good, repeatable behaviors you see?
The monthly/quarterly ones are the easiest to imagine (whatever your org’s version of “karaoke night every time we raise another $100,000 in donations” is). The daily/hourly ones can ultimately come down to habituating Reveal & Remark. I’ve found that leaders have the hardest time planning out weekly morale-boosters that are linked to performance. Here are a few quick ideas:
- First, note that whatever repeated behavior you think is likely to have a key impact on performance is often what startup strategy people often call “core values.”
- Tagging positive feedback to a core value is useful because, rather than seeming like a one-off line, people can integrate it into their broader understanding of what it means to be effective at this org. In other words, they have a specific shelf to put that feedback on.
- This implies that, in your weekly Recognition Frequency Tracker, tagging your praise to a core value gives it even more mileage — people know how to generalize the positive feedback in novel ways.
- Finally, I recommend some kind of weekly team-wide celebration of people who actively demonstrated the core values (praise celebrations, gratitude circles, and so on), where the kudos always identify a great behavior and tag it to one of the values.
As previously noted, building culture is about linking vibe-enhancement to performance and mission-fulfillment. Don’t sit back and wait for this to happen on its own; set up the institutional triggers that ritualize this connection.
-Ben
