Team culture encompasses the collective mindset and behaviors that define how your team interacts and operates. It reflects the unwritten rules and values that shape your team's approach to decision-making, conflict resolution, and achieving goals. A healthy culture aligns individual motivations with team goals, creating an environment where people feel motivated, understood, and empowered to bring their best selves to work.
Key elements of team culture include:
Communication Patterns – How does your team share information? Are conversations open and collaborative or more hierarchical and guarded?
Conflict Resolution – How does your team handle disagreements? Is conflict seen as an opportunity for growth or something to be avoided at all costs?
Shared Values – What underlying principles guide your team’s work? Are these values aligned with individual motivations?
Engagement and Motivation – How invested are team members in their roles and responsibilities? What drives their sense of purpose?
At Cloverleaf, we believe culture is dynamic. It evolves as teams grow, change, and face new challenges. The question is not whether your team has a culture, but how intentional you are in shaping it. By using tools like the Team Dashboard, Culture Pulse, and Instinctive Drives assessments, you can take an active role in cultivating a culture where every team member feels valued and motivated.
Using Culture Pulse to Understand Team Culture
The Culture Pulse assessment helps you get a real-time read on the health and dynamics of your team’s culture and how their different approaches to work and communication contribute to it.
Team Culture Implications: Balanced distribution of Team Members
When a team has a good mix of means-oriented and goal-oriented people, they are balancing out their “why” (means-oriented) and their “how”(goal-oriented) people.
This can be especially helpful when the goal-oriented team members stray from the original purpose of a project or idea. The means-oriented team members will hold the “why” front and center and measure the process against its alignment with purpose.
In the same way, when the means-oriented people are stuck in creating intention and get more philosophical or theoretical, the goal-oriented team members will provide a more tactical approach.
Coaching Questions for Teams:
How do we leverage this balance right now?
What specific project or initiative would benefit most from leaning into this balance and why?
What can people on one end of the spectrum of organizational effectiveness learn from the opposite end?
(i.e. what do you wish your opposite colleagues understood about you more?)
Team Culture Implications: Imbalanced Distribution of Team Members
People Clustered at the Means-Oriented end of the Spectrum
When team members are clustered and reflect more means-oriented behavioral tendencies, they might be trapped in white boarding, brainstorming or spend time on a theoretical tangent which can lead to a lack of goal clarity.
Coaching Questions for Teams
What tactical practices within meetings or strategic planning sessions help them focus on outcomes? (and if not, what should the team create?)
For example, a best practice to keep teams goal-oriented is quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). These time bound goals are also inspired by the team and organizational purpose and can range from serving internal and external needs. A team can take on several OKRs per quarter and assign owners and collaborators to each.
How does this shared perspective positively impact the team’s culture?
What is the current impact of this aspect of the team?
How does it impact communication?
How does it impact team conflict?
What support does the team need to focus more time and energy on specific outcomes?
People Clustered at the Goal-Oriented End of the Spectrum
Team members that huddle towards the goal-oriented end of the spectrum probably have excellent tactical execution. They might get so focused on results that there needs to be a re-alignment with purpose and intention from time to time. In the same way that OKRs can support a more purpose driven team, team charters, or purpose statements can help set the tone for a year or quarter.
For example, as a team sets forth yearly objectives that fulfill company business priorities, documenting the purpose and intention of those objectives AND incorporating purpose as a ruler for future initiatives to be measured against can ensure that process and purpose stay closely aligned.
Coaching Questions for Teams
How does this shared perspective positively impact the team’s culture?
How often does the team do debriefs or reflections on executed projects?
What is the schedule for examining processes for necessary updates?
How would the team’s culture benefit from “slowing down to speed up?”
Team Culture Implication: Understanding Management Philosophy’s Impact
Scenario 1: A balance in this area means the team has a good mix of management styles that will likely resonate with a wide variety of people that they may lead. If the particular team dashboard is an in-tact team with one leader and individual contributors, it serves the leader to understand the differences in the individual's stated management philosophy.
TIP: People’s management philosophy often reflects how THEY like to be managed.
Scenario 2: The leader manages towards performance, but the team is clustered towards support.
Scenario 3: The leader managers toward support but the team is clustered towards performance
Coaching Questions for Teams
How does the leader of the team’s management philosophy align with the rest of the team?
How does the leader’s management philosophy impact the current team culture?
What do specific team members need more or less of to create more team alignment?
How is the current management philosophy of the team and leader impacting…
Team Communication
Team Conflict
The Employee Experience?
Using Instinctive Drives to Understand Team Culture: A Group Exercise: USE vs. AVOID
Consider which Instinctive Drives your team tends to USE
Facilitate a Team Discussion on I.D. Insights
Ask team members to share how they believe the team’s Instinctive Drive that is in USE impacts their work. Use questions like:
If you USE this drive more often than not, how does this instinctive drive in this area show up in your day-to-day work?
While more people USE this drive than AVOID it, what is the team experience for the smaller group of people?
How can we better support each other’s drives when working together on projects?
Consider which Instinctive Drives your team tends to AVOID
Facilitate a Team Discussion on I.D. Insights
Ask team members to share how they believe the team’s Instinctive Drive that the team collectively AVOIDS impacts their work. Use questions like:
If you AVOID this drive more often than not, how does this instinctive drive in this area show up in your day-to-day work?
While more people AVOID this drive than USE it, what is the team experience for the smaller group of people?
How can we better support each other’s drives when working together on projects?
Based on the discussion, create an action-oriented list of how you can modify team workflows to better align with your team’s Instinctive Drives. For example, if a team member is driven to Improvise, ensure they have the ability to use this in a way that serves the team
Tip for Team Leaders: Using ID insights regularly can help you adjust your management style to better fit individual needs and drive greater team cohesion.