Practice Culture Part Two: Supporting & Sustaining Your Practice Culture

In Part 1 of this series, we focused on the importance of your practice’s culture and how to go about defining and developing it. Once you’ve established the right culture for your practice, your next task is to take action to support it, promote it and “live” it.

In my extensive work with veterinary teams, I’ve observed that leaders who make a concerted effort to develop and maintain a strong workplace culture frequently reap the benefits of more cohesive teams and better business outcomes. This is consistent with an increasing amount of research showing that organizational culture directly impacts both employee morale and the bottom line.

What can you do to support and sustain your practice culture?

Here are 5 things to consider:

1. Keep Talking About Your Culture
2. Conduct a Culture Assessment
3. Recruit for Cultural Fit
4. Coach and Encourage Coaching
5. Lead by Example

Let’s take a closer look at each of these 5 actions.

1. Keep Talking About Your Culture

Just creating a written culture contract isn’t enough. A common mistake I see leaders make is to forget to make their culture contract a “living document.”

The natural tendency is to assume that once the team has co-created their vision of the desired culture that it will automatically begin to take root. Without regular attention, though, it’s easy for team members to revert back to older, more dysfunctional patterns of behavior.

Transformation from old patterns of behavior to new ones requires an ongoing focus. In her article, “Building Organizational Culture – Word by Word” (Leader to Leader, Winter 2006)¹, Tamara J. Woodbury emphasizes that:

The single most important thing you can do to sustain your desired practice culture is to make it a regular topic of discussion with your team.

Enhancing Communication Through Team Building

The easiest way to do this is to periodically (every few months) go back to your culture contract and consider these questions as a group:

The idea is to create a safe place for your team to share a variety of different perspectives and to discuss and address any “disconnects” between your espoused values and your actual behavior. Try to focus the conversation on what’s working and what you can do better or differently to achieve your cultural ideal, versus spending too much time discussing what’s not working (or who’s to blame).

2. Conduct a Culture Assessment

Looking at some objective data is often a helpful step in understanding the effectiveness of your practice’s culture. This information enables you to understand the impact your culture is currently having on your practice’s performance and can help you and your team members focus on the most important areas for improvement. There are a variety of formal and informal assessment tools to choose from, including the Denison Organizational Culture Survey®. The Denison survey measures team member perceptions on 60 items that relate to a variety of cultural attributes.

You can consider partnering with a coach or consultant certified to administer the Denison or another culture assessment or simply design your own survey. Either way, your goal would be to share the data obtained with your team to stimulate additional conversation about what you’re doing well and how you can build on your current strengths to get even better.

3. Recruit for Cultural Fit

When you have a clear picture of the values and behaviors that exemplify success in your practice culture, one of the most powerful things you can do to support and sustain the culture is to select for people who share your values when hiring for open positions.

It’s essential that you know the core competencies (for example):

• effective communication skills
• service orientation
• positive attitude

that are required to be a good “cultural fit” for your practice. Then, you’ll want to use behavioral interview questions to determine if prospective employees have demonstrated these competencies in the past.

An example of a behavioral interview question is, “Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with a team member. What was the situation, what did you do to resolve the issue, and what was the outcome?” To successfully answer this question, the candidate must recall a specific situation and identify how they handled it.

Don't Let One Bad Apple Spoil the Bunch

What Not To Do

With a more typical interview question like, “How would you handle conflict with a teammate?” any job candidate can tell you what you want to hear.

4. Coach Your Team and Encourage Team Members to Coach Each Other

To really make a difference, your team’s culture contract must be integrated into all of your leadership and management practices. One obvious application of this principle would be to provide feedback to each employee related to their alignment with the elements of your team’s culture contract as part of their regular performance review.

During staff meetings you might choose to personally acknowledge and recognize team members who demonstrate behaviors that are consistent with your cultural ideals. Or you can invite staff members to share stories about themselves or fellow team members that highlight living out your practice culture in a positive way.

An equally effective approach would be to create an opportunity for individual team members to ask each other for feedback and to develop their own behavioral change strategy. Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith and co-author Howard Morgan share a great way to do this in their article, “Team Building Without Time Wasting.”²

Ask, Don't Tell: A Coaching Approach to Staff Development

5. Lead By Example

Last but not least, you must lead by example. In their book, The Truth About Leadership, authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner state that, “You either lead by example, or you don’t lead at all.”

A critical job of veterinary business leaders is to actively mold and manage their practice culture, that is, to continuously reinforce a shared set of practices and beliefs. Getting both leaders and team members to support and sustain your practice’s culture takes time, determination, and a willingness to make your culture a top priority. The effort might be high, but the payoff will be worth it!

The 5 Qualities of an Authentic Leader
6 Questions To Ask Your Team To Ensure Success

References

¹ http://www.pfdf.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=87
² http://www.performanceatwork.co.nz/pages/510/Team%20Building%20without%20Time%20Wasting.pdf