How to build team culture in a remote coaching business.

We once bought every team member a $100 running watch. Then we trained the whole team, seven or eight people, for a marathon with a professional coach.

It was a remote team, and some of it worked from the Philippines. The marathon was the culture: a hard goal, trained for together, with a result anyone could check.

What is team culture in a coaching business?

How the team behaves with clients when the founder is not in the chat. Your team is the coaching offer. A client who gets a slow, long, confusing reply experiences the program as slow, long and confusing, whatever the training says.

So culture is not a perk list. In a remote coaching team it shows in how fast clients hear back and how simple the messages are. And in whether anyone chases an overdue client without being asked.

Which core values work for a coaching team?

Short ones about behaviour. Ours were a GOAT mentality, meaning we work like a professional sports team. The second was "client results or die." Both tell a team member what to do on a bad day. Neither needs a slide to explain it.

Values only count if they decide something. When a client writes late and the chat is quiet, client results or die says who answers. When a teammate misses an overdue client, the sports-team value says someone mentions it, kindly and the same day.

• Write each value as something a person does, not a trait they have.
• Tie at least one value to client results, the thing the business is paid for.
• Keep the list short enough that everyone can say it from memory.
• Repeat the values often, and let the team hold each other to them.

How do you hire for culture?

Before any interview. Nobody gets a meeting until they send a Loom of themselves, and out of about 30 Looms we meet one or two. In the Loom you read the person more than the track record.

In the interview we ask who they were in high school and what their hobbies are. Then the biggest challenge in their life, and how they got through it. Then a situational one: a client writes that they want to quit this program; how do you react? "Are you a hard worker?" has never once been answered with no. We stopped asking it.

Situational questions show behaviour, and behaviour is what culture is made of.

Why give a remote team one shared goal?

Because a remote team has no hallway. People who never meet need something they are working on together, beyond their own task list. The marathon worked because it was hard, measurable and the same for everyone.

At work the shared goal is client results. The client success rate on the dashboard is a number the whole team moves together, from the closer's handover to the last check-in. Setters on that team stayed three years and more.

Make the shared number visible. Put the client success rate where the whole team sees it, and mention it when it moves. A team that watches one number together starts to talk about the clients behind it.

What kills culture in a coaching team?

Keeping the wrong people. In one program we took over, the delivery team was toxic, not doing the work, and most of them were unnecessary. Almost all of them were let go, and client complaints went from many a week to almost none in two months.

Random hires do the same damage more slowly. Every person hired without a clear picture of the role learns the job by guessing, and the guesses become the culture. Be very clear about what you are looking for before the post goes up.

A founder who says the values and acts differently does the same damage. If the founder answers clients with long, late messages, the team copies that, not the values page.

Further reading: The interview questions that find a real client success manager · When your coaching team is the problem