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The ever-changing faces of a team, the turnover of your personnel can easily become a point of personal exhaustion.

How can you maintain your messaging, your culture, your ethos, when those to whom you are instilling this leadership style are rarely the same people at all times of the year? How can your message get out even when you’re not around to repeat it?

Over the years, I’ve come to value several tools that help point a consistent finger towards the slowly evolving culture of our team even when the team members that maintain that culture are moving much more rapidly in comparison. The first of these tools in in the Group Welcome Pack. I wrote ours around 4 years ago and have been refining it ever since. It’s the scene-setting document that ever new team member sees before they ever crack open a thesis or paper. It’s not quite as weighty and unmoving as an anchor, but more like the North Star - slow to drift but good at setting direction.

A more challenging but very useful complement to the Welcome Pack is a regular group meeting schedule. I’ve sinned often in failing to maintain such a schedule, especially during our highest team turnover times, and even more so during the pandemic (though I don’t hold the latter as an all-encompassing external blame agent). When this works, it works very well. It helps positively hold all team members accountable to one another, and it brings out the valued productive surprises that only conversation can. Away from emails and texts and project platform chats, meeting as a team is the perfect forum to reinforce only those parts of your leadership message that need regular nurturing and feedback.

What tools will you use to maintain your team culture when the faces of your team change quicker than you can prepare for?

If you have a question for Marc, upload an audio recording for it to be featured on a later Q&A episode!