Work like a pirate

Last time we talked about what’s the positive sides to have a team. Now we’re talking about how we establish our team culture.

What’s a team culture?

By the most basic definition, a team culture is made up of the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours shared by a team. It’s how people work together towards a common goal and how they treat each other.

What we choose to do

Culture is a difficult concept to grasp because it’s generally unspoken and unwritten, so we decided to write it. We have to build a team culture around the principles of democracy, shared ownership, transparency, efficiency, and profitability. What we soon discovered was that it had already been done. Two hundred years ago.

By pirates!

Pirate crews of the 18th century learned a number of lessons about retaining talent and running a profitable business. Lessons that modern teams would be foolish to ignore.

Our team culture in DuckMa

Here, summarized in 10 rules, you will find our team culture:

«Why join the Navy if you can be a pirate?» (Steve Jobs)

So that’s how you establish a team culture. But remember, it is possible to grow and evolve a team’s culture over time. It all starts with identifying where you are now and where you want to be. The only way to make change is take ownership and action it as a united team.