How to Build a Strong Team Culture

Building a Strong Company Culture: 5 Key Steps 

By Ariel Ilarslan Russo and Jeffrey Camp  

Creating a positive, strong company culture in a company is a way to help ensure longevity of your business. But how can one really develop a positive culture around other people & build a strong team to maximize and optimize long-term success? 

Most companies today think of metrics such as ARR, MRR, GMV, unit economics, LTV, CAC, among others to measure results but they forget at times the importance of building a human infrastructure for the scalability of the company. 

The question that all C-level executives ask is how to optimize alpha for the company you’re working on? The best way to engage in this responsibility is leading the company to a transformational impact, not just thinking about the regular transactional impact. 

At the 'Cane Angel Network, we decided to take a closer look to team culture, and how it can help some of the start-ups that work with us to improve not only their product development but also their team culture development in order to be scalable and efficient as they grow. With all the capital flowing in today, it is easier for companies to raise capital than to acquire human capital. 

According to Saif Ishoof, Senior Advisor for Innovation & Tech to  MiamiMajor Francis Suarez, the discipline behind building a strong team culture in the workplace have 5 practical steps to achieve it: 

1. Values ​​alignment: Companies that clearly define their purpose or mission and use their values ​​to support it are well positioned for long-term success. Value alignment is a strategic business element that helps companies to work toward achieving goals. Business leaders must constantly ask themselves: Am I inspiring continual growth and innovation? am I doing everything possible to help organizations optimize and adapt to the fast changing world we live today? What values ​​do I want to instill in my team? Clearly, the speed with which the entire current ecosystem is changing accelerates the change of thinking of leaders to inspire and empower their employees to achieve their full potential. At 'Cane Angel Network' we are committed to helping the companies in our portfolio to remain positioned for long term success. 
2. Communication: In today's rapidly changing business world, it is very important to understand how cultural factors influence communication between individuals and groups in the workplace. Leaders must take the time to spend time with folks outside the usual leadership environment, and in this way promote 1: 1 meetings to connect on pressing issues, develop a robust relationship, and ensure that the employee is feeling that he is working toward his goals. Nowadays, it's all about mobilization of human capital, thus rethinking about the communication modality in the workplace is a great way to be able to retain talent and make them achieve their own goals while adding value to the company.  To ensure you integrate this process into your company, you might ask yourself: Are you modeling leadership behavior? Are you spending time outside of your leadership circle; Are you absorbing feedback effectively? 
3. Promote & Encourage Growth Mindsets: Growth for your employees means growth for your business, so a leader must promote growth mindset within the organization to motivate they’re team to work harder and become more productive. Once the mindset is ingrained in the organization, workers will enjoy going the extra mile to achieve success and consequently create a better work environment for organizational success. Leaders who promote growth mindsets within the organization understand that leaders are also learners, and that failure is an opportunity to grow, reframing the crash and burn to crash and learn, therefore, promoting those who are committed to growing no matter the circumstances.
4. Radical Transparency: Transparency in the workspace is crucial for an organization. Employees with accurate information can make better decisions, thus performing better by feeling that they have total trust from the company. That is why at 'Cane Angel Network' we think that a good measure to promote transparency in an organization is to open the KPI dashboard so that employees can understand exactly what is happening in the company and in this way generate a flywheel effect of transparency that gets stronger. 
5. Create Human Spaces: Employee productivity is the heart and soul of a business, that is why promoting inclusion and a sense of belonging in an organization is the most important thing a leader should do. Surroundings influence your productivity, so promoting joy (even small victories like a new coffee machine in the workspace) generates a positive environment with empathy so that employees feel comfortable and can perform in the necessary way to achieve personal and organizational goals. 

 This page was written by Ariel Ilarslan Russo and Jeffrey Camp. Mr. Russo has a Bachelor’s degree in Finance & Entrepreneurship from Babson College and a Master’s degree of Science in Finance from the University of Miami. Ariel is currently involved in the Venture Capital landscape helping future business founders develop a thesis around strategy and execution. As a student member of the Cane Angel Network, Ariel helped doing strict due diligence to companies and helped developing a thesis around building a strong culture for success within start-ups. Mr. Camp is the Managing Director of the Cane Angel Network.