17 - Who Is Your Team Becoming

5 minutes

You join a new organization. The walls say Integrity. Respect. Teamwork. Excellence.

Within your first week, you start learning the real rules.

Can I disagree with the boss?
What happens when someone makes a mistake?
Who gets away with what?
What do people say after the meeting?

You learn those rules by watching how people think, talk, decide, treat each other, and handle problems.

Soon you start adjusting.
You speak up. Or hold back.
Ask for help. Or hide the problem.

Every human group—work, family, friends, church, neighborhood—develops its own habits of thinking and doing. Its own culture.

Sometimes culture flows from intentional decisions about how the group will think and act.

More often, it grows out of thousands of ordinary moments. How people frame problems and opportunities. How they make decisions. How they react to decisions. What they treat as important and what they let slide.

Intentional or not, culture is the product of practice—what people repeatedly think and do.

Your team already has a culture. The question is whether it’s the culture you want.

Culture Is a Team’s Character

Repeated thinking and doing become habits.
Habits become character.

Your character is who you are in this moment—and who you are Becoming.

The same is true in relationships. A couple develops shared ways of thinking and doing. Those shared habits become the character of their relationship.

Every team works the same way. There are just more people practicing.

Shared habits become the culture.

Your character is your personal habits of thinking and doing.
Your culture is your team’s shared habits of thinking and doing.

In a simple sense, your culture is your team’s character.

The culture you have is the culture you’ve been practicing.

Like character, culture never stands still. It never stops Becoming. A team that never decides on its culture still gets one.

How we frame situations, opportunities, and challenges.
How we see and treat people.
Whether we take others in good faith or with suspicion.
What we make of mistakes.

Practice the same thinking and doing consistently and you get a clear culture. People know what to expect.

A clear culture isn’t necessarily a good one.

Practice inconsistently, and the culture becomes muddy. Nobody knows what to expect.

The values on the wall say what the team thinks is important. The culture is what the team actually does. When the two don’t match, people notice. They become jaded and cynical. Trust, commitment, and performance drop.

Because culture is habits, you change culture the same way you change any habit: by practicing something different, on purpose.

I watched a leader do exactly that.

If the Commander Can Say It

I flew Marine Corps AV-8B Harriers when the aircraft was relatively new. It is a single-seat jet, so the pilot is the only person in the plane. Military pilots are strong-willed, self-confident people who take pride in how they perform.

The Harrier was challenging to fly. Small mistakes could become catastrophic. We had a lot of crashes and lost pilots. We needed to double down on safety and attention to detail.

At our weekly pilot meetings, our squadron commander began the meetings by sharing a stupid mistake he had made that week.

He forgot to safe his ejection seat after landing.
He got distracted and missed a checklist item.
He flew even though he didn’t get enough good sleep the night before.

By sharing his mistakes, he was setting the example and making a critical point. Even strong, self-confident pilots make mistakes.

When you make a mistake, you own it. You turn it into a lesson learned.

You share that lesson learned with your colleagues so they can learn from it.

If the commander can say it out loud, so can you.

The commander wasn’t just admitting mistakes. He was practicing the culture he wanted his pilots to practice.

Practice honesty with yourself and others. Learn. Become better. That’s wisdom.

I believe it saved aircraft and lives. Practicing it made us more humble and better.

Not just at work as pilots, but in the rest of our lives as colleagues, parents, and people.

The person you practice Becoming at work is the person you bring home to your family.

No Title Required

Leaders have the most impact on culture. They have direct responsibility for culture. They are more visible. Their decisions and actions touch more people.

But everyone on the team helps form the culture too. Including you. No title required.

Whether you are the team lead or the most junior person, everything you think, everything you do, has an impact on those around you.

Whether you love people or treat them like things.
What you say in the meeting—and after it.
Whether you tell the truth—or shade it.
How you handle mistakes.
Whether you keep your word.

Practice something good repeatedly, and it becomes a personal habit. When your example inspires others to do the same, you’re changing the culture.

When people repeatedly seek wisdom and practice love together, everything steps up.

Commitment deepens.
People bond.
Trust grows.
The team gets results.

You form the culture. The culture forms you.

The culture you inherited matters. You can’t change the past.

It doesn’t have to be the culture you keep practicing. You can choose what you practice next.

The culture you practice today becomes the culture you work in tomorrow. It drives trust, commitment, and performance.

Who am I Becoming? Who are we Becoming? They’re connected.

People Become. Relationships Become. Teams Become too.

You don’t need a title to shape the people and teams around you.

Consider

Think about the groups you’re part of.

What are their habits of thinking and doing?

Which ones are helping you Become a good person? Which ones are holding you back?

If those habits keep going the same way they’re going, who will those groups Become?

Next: You’re Already a Leader

Seek Wisdom. Practice Love. Get Results.
Make what is best real.

— Pete

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