It’s always bothered me that building a healthy working environment isn’t described in most managerial job descriptions. This is the most important work a manager can perform to strengthen engagement and performance, yet working on the working environment is mostly ignored in the daily rush for results. 

In this article, I offer ideas and approaches to help managers jump-start this critical work. (A version of this article appeared originally at SmartBrief on Leadership.)

First, Tune In to Your Team’s Working Environment

Every functional group or project team develops a unique culture that governs how people work together and how work gets done. This mini-culture or working environment is a microcosm of the larger organization’s culture but governed locally by the personalities and behaviors of the participants, especially the manager or group lead.

The working environment determines how work gets done. It defines the rules for collaborating, communicating, problem-solving, and decision-making, to name a few key activities. It also governs how people feel about each other and their work together.

The Working Environment Explains the Performance Gap

Think of the best work or team experience in your career. Chances are, people arrived daily prepared to take on the world. I’ll wager the group members knew how to engage, debate, resolve, challenge, fight, make-up, and ultimately push each other to be at their best. Yes, this was a healthy working environment.

Contrast the healthy team environment with too many settings where individuals go through the motions or spend much of their time arguing their way through their days. In these settings, groups never develop as teams, collaboration takes a back-seat to political posturing and turf wars, and there’s little gravitational pull to join these groups with good people often preferring to leave for healthier situations.

There’s a stark contrast between healthy and unhealthy working environments. In my experiences over the decades, the difference between poor and high performance is explained by the manager’s or team lead’s commitment to forming and framing the environment, not just working in it.

The potential for a healthy working environment exists in every team or group setting; however, bringing it to life takes deliberate focus and hard work.

The Five Building Blocks of a Healthy Working Environment

Effective managers understand they control the weather on their teams. While the circumstances and variables change from situation to situation, they focus on five key factors to create a healthy working environment. 

1. Create Manager Role Clarity with Your Team Members

Most managers have a decent handle on what’s expected of them from their boss. What’s missing is understanding what their team members need and want from them at a point in time. If you are managing, try asking your team members what they need from you. Use this simple, powerful question: “At the end of our time working together, when we’re, and you’re successful, what will you say I did?

Yes, you and your boss get a vote on your role, but your group’s needs at this point are what count when it comes to creating a healthy working environment. So, take this process a step further, turn their input into your Manager’s Charter, and share it with them. Then, reference this daily to guide your priorities and support your team members. 

2. Pursue Rapid Time-to-Trust

The late Northwestern professor J. Keith Murninghan writing in the still relevant book, Do Nothing! Discover the Power of Hands-Off Leadership offers research that suggests the idea of Swift Trust to raise the odds of success: 

Yes, it can feel awfully risk, and it is perfectly natural to be cautious because trust always entails risk. But great leadership is not possible without trust: it is absolutely required.

And

By trusting more, leaders can start a positive chain of reciprocity. Taking a risk (with trust) with a professional has a very high probability of resulting in the person’s stepping up and doing their best.

It’s up to the manager to catalyze this positive chain of reciprocity. Start by giving your trust from minute one of your working relationship. Yes, do your diligence ahead of time, but if the evidence suggests the individual is capable, give your trust immediately.

Individuals who feel trusted by the boss will move mountains to live up to this overt sign of respect. And, for the occasional person who betrays your trust, deal with it then instead of holding everyone hostage.

3. Work with Your Group to Define the Rules for Success

Think about your working environment. How do you answer these questions?

  • What defines what’s expected of you and your team members when it comes to working together?
  • What does accountability mean on this team?
  • How about trust?
  • Where is the import and responsibility for giving and receiving feedback spelled out for the group?
  • How are individuals expected to communicate with each other, particularly when they disagree?
  • How are problem-solving and decision-making activities expected to unfold?
  • How do you bring new group members into the fold and help them learn what it means to be partners in this work?

The activities defined in the questions above are standard parts of daily work life, and of course, everyone wants them to run smoothly. Yet, most functional or project team environments have no guiding values or expectations to help people navigate the sticky issues that follow people everywhere. 

The lack of these Rules for Success (effectively group values) as I describe them leads to many less-than-ideal behaviors and unhealthy working environments. Fortunately, it’s not challenging to fill this gap by engaging your team members and writing the rules for success.

Engage your team members in an exercise to define what it means to be a part of the group. Use these  terms as thought prompters for your group’s Rules for Success:

  • Trust
  • Accountability
  • Communication
  • Feedback
  • Decision-Making
  • Problem-Solving
  • Disagreements 

Ask them to put substance around these terms that clarify expectations and desired behaviors and then roll them up and make them visible and tangible in the working environment. 

This exercise fires up the creativity of the individuals involved. It makes them feel empowered and yes, trusted, as they work together to define what it means to be a part of the group. And the manager gains a valuable platform for coaching and feedback. 

4. Create Connectivity to the Bigger Picture with Help From Your Boss

The presence of a “clear and compelling purpose” is essential in team development and in providing context for contributor work in every setting. Help everyone around you see how their work connects to the larger goals and strategies of the organization, and reinforce the importance of their work to the larger mission.

In workshops where I work with frontline managers, I observe a focus on the group’s work but relatively little connectivity to the larger picture of the organization. The head of content marketing understands the importance of content to grow visibility and generate leads but has little understanding of how the group’s work fits the larger goals. The customer service manager understands how his team’s performance is measured but cannot connect to larger goals around lifetime value or competitive differentiation. 

If you cannot directly connect your group’s work to your organization’s or unit’s goals and strategies, it’s time to talk with your boss. Ask questions about plans, performance metrics, and strategy. Work together to drill into the information and create a connection between what you and your team members do and the bigger picture.

Armed with context for the importance of their work, individuals will move mountains to innovate, problem-solve, and strengthen performance. And yes, these are all significant indicators of a healthy working environment.

5. Create Comfort with Feedback in Three Directions

When I ask individuals how feedback should flow in an organization or group, ten times out of ten, I hear, “Up and down.” They’re right, of course, but the answer leaves out the most critical direction: sideways.

Too often, we relegate feedback to a hierarchical process with the emphasis on top-down relationships. Yet, I argue significant performance gains from feedback occur when quality feedback flows horizontally between group members.

With proper, behavioral, performance-focused feedback, individuals can help each other adjust, adapt, and learn on the fly. Importantly, when giving and receiving quality feedback is part of the Rules for Success in the environment, performance conversations tend to focus on the big issues standing in the way of progress and performance.

Healthy working environments are characterized by quality feedback flowing in every direction. 

The Bottom Line for Now:

Building an environment where individuals are motivated to do their best collaborating, innovating, and problem-solving with team members is hard work. While most managers operate in transaction mode, fighting fires, dealing with priority shifts, answering questions from team members, and participating in meetings, the best managers work daily to create a healthy working environment. It might not be in your job description, but it’s essential for sustained success. 

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