When leaders pursue great workplace cultures – workplaces with trust, pride and camaraderie – they need to ask important questions.  But, the questions they need to ask are slightly different than those for many workplace issues, and the differences are so slight that it is easy for leaders to ask the question that creates more confusion than clarity.  When it comes to improving culture, questions should center around instinct rather than proof, strengths rather than shortcomings, and intentions rather than goals.

The right question: In what ways do stronger relationships help us accomplish our goals?

The often question: What is the return on investment?

Once leaders realize that culture is about relationships, and truly internalize that perspective, they stop worrying about return on investment as a data point necessary for moving forward. Do you consider the return on investment before sharing openly with your significant other, offering birthday wishes or congratulations to friends, or reading your child a bedtime story? My guess is no.  You do those things because you’ve learned on an intuitive level that the more trust you have in your relationships, the more effortless, supportive, and mutually beneficial they become.  The same is true in the workplace.  When there’s trust, people have shorthand communication, which helps them move more quickly in making a decision or executing a plan.  People make the extra effort to help and support colleagues, whether they are in front of a client or home with a sick child.  People trust that even when they don’t fully understand a decision, it was made with the best of intentions.  These are things for which you cannot calculate an ROI, though we all know they matter.  We’ve experienced it in our own relationships.  If along the way it becomes possible to show monetary outcomes that are a direct result of an investment in trust, please tell us about them!  But, don’t let the lack of a projected return stop you from acting.

The right question: In what areas do we already have trust, pride and camaraderie?  How can we do more of the right thing?

The often question: What do we need to improve upon in order to improve the culture?  How can we do less of the wrong thing?

I’ve worked with several companies on improving the trust, pride, and camaraderie in the workplace.  My work often begins with a survey, where employees respond to statements meant to capture their experiences with regard to relationships at work.  Inevitably, when the results are in, leaders’ eyes go to the lowest results.  Some even create a “bottom 10” list of statements to drive action plans for the year.  One of my most important tasks as a consultant is to remind leaders that unless the result is a zero – zero employees experience trust, pride and camaraderie – it means that someone, somewhere is having a positive experience.  Find out why and replicate it.  By definition, culture arises from the repeated and successful resolution of business problems.  Find the success and you’ve got your action plan, prebuilt and likely to produce a better workplace experience.

The right question: What are the next 2-3 steps we can take to build more trust, pride, and camaraderie?

The often question: What is my action plan for the next year to build more trust, pride, and camaraderie?

Any action you take to build culture must be a natural step from the current culture.  While visions of the future are important, culture change isn’t mechanistic enough to create long or even medium-term plans.  To use an analogy borrowed from Dan Pink, culture is a tree, not a TV set.  You can’t invent culture; it evolves from the sum total of variables in the environment.  If you try to plan too far ahead when facilitating its growth, you will likely make the wrong move.  Right now, you have enough information to know what the next few steps are, but to know what you’ll be doing a year from now when it comes to building more trust simply isn’t possible.  Unlike plans for developing a new product or rolling out a new IT solution, you can’t plan your actions for the next 6-12 months.  You can set an intention to have a more collaborative or open or fair workplace, assess the environment, take a few steps in the right direction, and then assess again.  Culture will evolve if you treat it as a tree – do what it needs at that time in order to grow and become even more healthy.

If you are working on building trust, pride, and camaraderie in the workplace, ask the right questions.  How do stronger relationships help us accomplish our business goals?  What is already going well?  What are my next few steps to helping things go even better?  Answers are important, but when it comes to culture, the questions that get you there cannot be taken for granted.