There are three ways workplace cultures unfold: accidentally, under a strong leader, and by design.

Accidental cultures are the most common. Certain cultural norms develop over time and solidify, sometimes in very productive ways. More frequently, mediocre tendencies prevail because most people only reach average energy and performance levels. Then there are the completely dysfunctional cultures that perform the bare minimum to survive.

Cultures shaped by strong leaders who exert their influence mold workplace cultures and produce very effective teams. They often possess the genius to see what behaviors produce desired results and then exert their will to enforce those behaviors through rewards, punishments, and peer pressure (aka shaming). That many leadership books exhort us to be this kind of leader, but this approach is unsustainable. Remove the leader and the culture breaks down.

The most successful workplace cultures result from their deliberate design. While the design’s impetus may come from a founder or strong leader, the people’s contributions are key. Company cultures that have been deliberately designed and are worth understanding include those at Barry-Wehmiller Companies and Bridgewater Associates. In Barry-Wehmiller CEO Bob Chapman’s book Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, it is made clear that every single person matters. When workers buy in, they contribute to everyone’s success.

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio also wrote a book, Principles, in which he details how he founded the company and developed “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.”  

A more objective and thorough assessment of Bridgewater is in An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. They study deliberately developmental organizations (DDOs) and wrote that Bridgewater’s culture is first and foremost about supporting its people’s development.

Multi-stakeholder project teams have successfully designed cultures that support those teams. The team at Bostwick Design Partnership deliberately designed their team as a learning culture to continually improve how they relate and work together. That team finished designing and building a family healthcare facility in Lakewood, Ohio at 21% below market cost. Through deliberate culture design, BDP also led a collaborative architectural and engineering design of a project initially budgeted at $13.5 million but now costing less than $8 million.    

While productive team cultures result from design that engages all team members, culture design is about how people can contribute to the team’s impact. In designing a team’s culture, five elements should be considered.

1. Developing an understanding that work is accomplished by conversations. Every action at work starts with conversation. Even automated systems that generate activity are proxies for the conversations they are designed to represent.
2. Designing those important conversations. Sometimes called protocols or communication frameworks, the conversations that support work processes need to be thoughtfully structured so people understand the requests and commitments informing the work.
3. Stressing the mutual responsibility at every work stage. There needs to be a shift away from individual to shared accountability. Individuals must make commitments, but the progress toward meeting those commitments must allow the team members to support others that are overburdened or cannot fulfill their commitments. 
4. Making all conversations visible to all parts of the organization. Design these systems so people can easily pull the information they need to support the organization’s mission.
5. Defining conversations as sources of inspiration and improvement. Conversations between humans will break down; instead, embrace practices that highlight breakdowns and work to improve the organization’s conversations to reduce future breakdowns.

Using team engagement to understand a team culture’s health, numerous Gallup surveys have confirmed that teams with healthy cultures also experience high levels of performance, productivity, safety, quality and well-being. Productive cultures focus on strengthening personal connections and creating the environment of mutual care that makes the above five elements possible.