In a fast changing world, where disruption is not only inevitable but frequent, organisations need to focus on building teams with collective positive mindsets.

When it comes to welcoming change and building resilient, high performing teams, it all boils down to one thing culture.

Culture isn’t a science, it’s an art. It’s not something you can download from the internet or google or even build a framework for. You can’t print it out, photocopy it or steal it from Spotify. It comes with one thing, strong leadership and to have strong leaders you need strong personnel.

I’m not talking about dominant personalities, I’m talking about people that lead by example, that take risks, that do things to inspire others even if it means being mocked. I’m talking about people who aren’t just not afraid to fail but welcome failure and admit when they messed up and not just to their bosses but to their peers as well.

In Mark Manson’s best selling book ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F@#%’ Mark writes “The more we admit we don’t know, the more opportunities we gain to learn”. That one quote speaks so admirably about the power of vulnerability, that it makes me want to make a big fat list of all the things I don’t know about and print it on a T-shirt and wear that T-shirt everyday.

In the same book Mark also wrote, ‘Manson’s Law’ which is ‘the more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

Let’s think about that for a second. Honesty threatens the part of us that desires respect and admiration and failure threatens the part of us that desires success. So if we spend our lives running away from honesty for fear of denting our pride and failure for fear of being unsuccessful then what kind of personnel are we? Better yet, what kind of personnel are our organisations harbouring?

A good friend of mine recently learned a great lesson about culture as she was being thrown under the corporate bus. She noticed that aside from the veterans holding on for long service leave, whenever a new starter joined the team, within weeks there were a whole bunch of their pals from their old work places joining them, kind of like a travelling circus. She told me that none of them actually needed to show any kind of vulnerability, humility or leadership, because they had ‘networking’ and “networking is all one needs in the corporate world”.

That friend of mine may be right, who knows. But what I do know is that when our leaders look to us to help drive change, to roll out new strategy and help them ‘dream big’, they’re looking to us to show leadership of our own, to work together and build culture filled with encouragement and contagious enthusiasm, to be bold and take risks and be not afraid of failure, and that my friends is an art not a science.