What ingredients create a great culture?
If you’re an entrepreneur or manager looking to build or maintain a strong and successful culture, start by assessing your current state.
In October 2011, my brother and I opened our first restaurant in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC.
I was burned out after 5 years as a lawyer working with families in the District’s child welfare system.
I thought selling pizza and beer would offer a temporary respite from dealing with social justice issues in a city shaped by segregation and inequality.
Mostly it did, even as we made the restaurant a hub for community events, fundraisers, and voter phone banks.
But when I read The Culture Playbook: 60 Highly Effective Actions to Help Your Group Succeed recently, I kept reflecting on the time racial strife almost tore our kitchen staff apart and really tested my ideas about team leadership.
It was the summer of 2013 and we had launched a second restaurant in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. I found myself with twice the employees and half the attention and energy to give each location.
As winter arrived, the DC location began to face challenges such as rising food costs and frequent miscommunication among the kitchen staff, most of whom were Black, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran.
Given the nature of the business and the hours of operation, the kitchen team was rarely all together. The morning squad deep cleaned, sliced tomatoes, caramelized onions, proofed pizza dough, and accepted produce deliveries. The evening squad hand-tossed pies, baked calzones, managed DoorDash drivers, and communicated with their server colleagues during the peak dinner rush.
One Saturday afternoon, we gathered the entire kitchen crew for a meeting on the second floor to understand what might be driving higher-than-usual food costs and conflict, and how we could fix it.
Fingers started pointing in every direction.
“José always wants to leave early... Oscar doesn’t clean his station... Darryl uses too much cheese... Tina doesn’t prepare the spinach correctly…”
Before I could fully process the highly personal rather than task-related explanations for our problems, two staff members said they had a solution.
My eyes beamed with pride. This is leadership. Look at what I’ve got here. Problem-solving pizza personnel.
So I said: “Hit me.”
And damn, they hit me. Hard.
“We think the best solution is that Latinos work in the morning. And Black people work at night.”
Excuse me? How long has Nelson Mandela been dead and my beloved crew was suggesting apartheid?
I took a deep breath. I tried not to scream or cry.
I adjourned the meeting in three sentences: “Absolutely not. We will meet again in two days and you can present another solution. I know we can do better than that.”
I sat down at the bar, pulled a draft beer, and reckoned with the fact that racialized conflict had happened on my watch. While I had designed rules and policies around how I wanted to treat my staff and grow the business, I had lost focus on what it takes to maintain a strong back-of-house culture when leading a diverse team.
In The Culture Playbook, author Daniel Coyle offers three pillars of action to build a strong and safe team culture: establish a purpose to connect with a shared mission, build safety to foster connection, and share weaknesses and vulnerabilities to learn and grow. I wish I had done more of these things from the start.
Create your group’s purpose
Coyle suggests finding your team’s purpose by reflecting on what your organization looks like at its best and considering what stops you from doing that every time. He also recommends making your purpose visible through an artifact. I’ve seen nonprofit and social enterprise advisory firm 20 Degrees use a disc-shaped stone to symbolize the inspiration for their company name, the optimal angle for skipping stones across water. Additionally, taking time to connect individual roles and goals to the mission gives employees a sense of ownership and allows them to see how their efforts contribute to the bigger picture.
Build safety within a group
When people feel safe, they also feel a sense of belonging and connection. In the Hustle Fund investor community, there is an expectation of respect and kindness through their “No Asshole Policy.” Safety can also be created by onboarding new team members with radical hospitality. This could be a personalized welcome, lunch with the team, or solo time with the manager. To further create a sense of safety, find ways to overthank your people, which could be through a designated #thanks Slack channel or similar forum where recognition and gratitude are encouraged and linked to positive outcomes.
Share vulnerability and admit mistakes
Creating a supportive environment in which people feel comfortable sharing their vulnerabilities and admitting mistakes builds trust. Coyle states that trust in turn leads to better collaboration and more innovation. As a leader, it is important to have strong opinions while remaining open to new information that might change your views. Genuine inquiries such as “What are your ideas?”, “What are we missing?”, “How can we make this better?” and “What takes my attempt to the next level?” can be invaluable in helping the team come up with creative solutions. After a project is completed, reviewing what went well, what didn’t, and considering what the team can do differently in the future is key. It’s also beneficial to remove obstacles that impede progress, create unnecessary friction, or cause distraction.
Maybe if I had incorporated these lessons early on, my diverse staff would’ve grown into a cohesive team. Instead, the only thing they agreed on was that they wanted me to implement a segregated kitchen.
48 hours after that first meeting, we reconvened on the second floor.
I thanked my team for their candor about the conflict they had with each other. I voiced my concern that the proposed fast fix could doom us in the long term. I asked, “How long will it take before you come back to me and say, ‘We think the best solution is for the Guatemalans to work in the morning and for the Salvadorans to work at night.’?”
We discussed the thought process behind their suggestion and the frustrations around lack of accountability. The Culture Playbook calls out the fallacy that successful cultures are “tension-free sunshine filled places where disagreements are rare and mistakes are few.” Rather, sharing vulnerability welcomes conflict as long as it is about the ideas and not the people.
We had to move past the “us vs. them” thinking and focus on what ideas and tasks could be improved. Everyone offered one thing they would change about the way the kitchen worked and we made a list of tasks each crew needed to complete to set the next shift up for success. We started a “thank you” jar to demonstrate gratitude and create opportunities for randomly drawn winners to earn extra cash. And we agreed that regardless of background, everyone made mistakes.
I had been slow to recognize the differences that existed within our diverse team. Before opening the second restaurant, I should have made sure we had the right leadership and actions in place to protect our work culture as I doubled my workload. I could have taken steps to organize team-building activities, create opportunities for employees to share their backgrounds, and seek input on how the kitchen could work better together.
We didn’t solve it all during that one meeting. We had more hard conversations and tension over the next several months. We engaged in what I now understand as the vulnerability loops described in The Culture Playbook, where admitting mistakes and asking for help builds stronger relationships and a place for learning and development. It wasn’t a straight line, but we developed a stronger culture, and the business improved.
If you’re an entrepreneur or manager looking to build or maintain a strong and successful culture, start by assessing your current state. Find your opportunities to establish purpose, build safety, share vulnerabilities, and admit mistakes. With the right actions, it’s possible to create a more supportive and effective culture where people feel seen, heard, welcomed, and invested in a shared outcome. Ideally, this would be the culture you’d set from the start. But if you haven’t, it’s never too late for a reset.