Creating A Team Culture By Design.
Four elements influence how a group behaves.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SBCR MODEL
In designing workplace culture, there are 3 influencing factors:
Cultural norms: the ‘expected’ way people behave in your workplace.
Leadership behaviours: the leadership behaviours that other’s emulate.
Individual capability: individual competence.
How do we influence these elements? By focussing on what we can control and being really clear about how we want our team to behave in four elements:
The systems they use.
The behaviours they endorse and role model.
The communication they demonstrate.
The relationships they prioritise.
The SBCR Model.
In my experience leading Happiness Concierge, whenever something went wrong, I discovered that:
System: a system wasn’t yet in place to safeguard quality e.g. RAG status, retrospective, meeting cadence, feedback.
Behaviour: a behaviour hadn’t been endorsed, boundaried or rewarded. e.g. speaking to the person, not about the person; being on time and prepared for meetings.
Relationship: the foundational ‘ground rules’ of a relationship hadn’t been made clear.
Communication: people weren’t communicating clearly or effectively.
Leadership is about producing results.
And you need a system for getting those results. These four categories (systems, behaviours, communication and relationships) remind us of what we can influence.
Let’s review the SBCR Model in action.
These are all leadership traits and systems.
ORGANISED SYSTEMS
Efficient and effective workflow
Expectations extrapolated and clarified
Timely, transparent reporting
Consistent delivery
Quality control
Culture (yes, culture is a system!)
COMMUNICATING OWNERSHIP
Confidence
Listening skills
Feedback (ability to receive, action and give feedback)
Speaking skills
Writing skills
ACCOUNTABLE BEHAVIOURS
Outcome drive
Relationship with success
Emotional regulation
Responsibility
Accountability
RESPECTFUL RELATIONSHIPS
Health
Boundaries
Capacity to support others
Trust
Judgement
Stakeholder relationships
Work is not a community, or a family, although it sure can feel like it at times.
It's a system.
And within that system, it is entirely within our control to create the conditions for people to opt into behaving, communicating, relating to and operating within a system of our own design.
From this place, our job as leaders becomes to make it clear what the expectation is and how we can help people get there if they need a helping hand.
When we look at leadership this way, isn’t it neat to have a reliable, checklist of sorts, to focus on developing?
Reflect on which of the four could be useful for your team.
As you read the above list of systems, behaviours, communication and relationships, the invitation is to reflect on this: which of the four is humming well? Which of the four could be an opportunity for your leadership?
If we accept that leadership is about trying different things to get better results, we can experiment with our own systems, behaviours, communications and relationships.
And over time, those edits really add up.
The secret to creating a culture of high performance.
It happens by design. Bring this training to your workplace for your leaders to go through the four steps to a high performance culture. Learn more.