By Design or By Default? Building a positive team culture in choirs and beyond.

September always feels like a fresh start, don't you think?

Choirs begin a new term. Workforces return from annual leave, ready to start new projects. Schools fill with shiny new faces. Plans are made. Diaries fill up. Goals are set.

For years, I did the same thing when preparing for the autumn. I sat down and asked myself: what is my choir going to achieve this year?

A while ago, I put that question down. I replaced it with a different one: who are we, as a choir, going to become?

It's a question I've become increasingly fascinated by, because I've realised something that now seems obvious once you've seen it, but took me years to notice.

Every time a group meets it's shaping its culture, whether anyone intends it to or not. The only choice is whether that happens by design, or by default.

My Nanna always believed that it's the little moments that count. I didn't understand what she meant when I was younger. I understand it now, every single week, standing in a room full of people, all of them with completely different life experiences and all quietly deciding whether this is a place they want to keep coming back to.

Because positive team culture isn't created by a mission statement on a website, or a list of values framed on a wall. It's created in hundreds of tiny moments that most people never consciously register.

Think about the last meeting you sat in. Who got to finish their sentence, and who got talked over? Did the quietest person in the room get heard, or did they learn, again, that it wasn't worth the effort of speaking up? Was there a genuine sense of safety in that room, the kind where you could say something half-formed, something not fully thought through, without fear of being judged for it? You probably couldn't tell me what was on the agenda. You could almost certainly tell me how it felt.

Here's what that looks like in practice, in my own choir.

At the end of every rehearsal, I say goodbye to people at the door and I use their name when I do it. Not "thank you for coming," but "thank you for coming, Sarah." It costs me nothing and it tells them something: I know you're here, specifically you, not just a body in the alto section. It's also when I get the chance to check in properly, with the person who's recently been bereaved, the one whose health has been difficult, the one who's having a really tough time negotiating their child’s EHCP. None of that happens from the front of the room. It happens at the door, in twenty seconds, but it makes people feel seen, important and a part of something.

Then there's the quiet, introverted people. They may bravely ask a question in rehearsal from the back row, often so quietly that it barely reaches me. Instead of asking them to repeat it louder, I just say, "Sorry, I can't quite hear you." And the group does the rest. They shush themselves and quieten down so that quieter voice can be heard. I could silence the room myself in half a second. But that misses the point. The point is that the group learns, through its own effort, that the loudest voice in the room isn't automatically the most important one.

I think that's one of the bigger leadership ideas hiding in a small moment. Most of us, when we lead, default to being the one who fixes things. Yes, I could call for quiet, settle disputes (generally over song structure or notes!), and make all the decisions. But there's a different kind of authority in deliberately not doing that. In stepping back and letting the group do the work of noticing, of correcting itself, of choosing kindness without being told to. A room that has had to practise that skill for itself holds onto it. A room that's simply been told to do things, doesn't.

We build on that everywhere we can. I regularly get people to turn to the person next to them and tell them that they did well that session. We look for reasons to tell people they were brilliant, out loud, in front of everyone. And when something needs to improve (because of course it does, we're a community choir!), I'll say so, plainly and often with a fair bit of cheek, but it is never delivered as criticism. It never comes from a place of needing them to sound right in order for me to feel OK. That distinction matters more than almost anything else I do. The moment a leader's approval starts depending on someone else's performance, the room feels it, even if nobody could tell you how. People stop taking risks. They start performing for safety instead of singing for joy.

One of our less confident singers sang a solo for the first time last month. Just for context, we don't audition for solos - anyone who wants to can sing one. Afterwards, she said something I still think about: "Am I the best singer? No. Am I good enough? Yes." What made that moment possible wasn't her voice;  it was the room around her. No back-biting. No bitchiness. Just a choir that got behind her, rooted for her and let her grow into herself, in her own time, on her own terms. I know that people messaged her throughout the term just to say well done. Nobody organised that. Nobody had to. That's what a culture built by design, rather than left to default, actually produces; people who are confident enough to try - because they have a whole group of cheerleaders who believe in them before they believe in themselves.

Part of what makes that possible, I think, is something we say often and repeatedly throughout the year: that any judgement we have of someone else usually tells us more about where we ourselves are stuck than it does about them. The choice is to either sit with that and let it teach you something, or let it go.

So when someone walks into your group or your workplace this autumn, what will they pick up in the first ten minutes, not from what you tell them, but from what they see and feel? Will they walk into a room of tight-knit cliques who already know each other, or will someone notice they're standing alone and bring them in? Will they see the most confident people getting all the attention, or will they sense that however you show up, you're already enough?

Every one of those moments answers that question, whether we mean it to or not. Every gathering nudges the culture a little further in one direction.

That's why I've stopped asking how to build a successful choir, and started asking a different question instead: what kind of community is this choir becoming? Because if we get that right, I think the music takes care of itself. And I suspect the same is true for a great deal more than choirs.

My Nanna never used the word "culture." She didn't need to. She just knew that people remember how you made them feel, and that the small stuff was never really small at all.

As September approaches, maybe the most useful question any of us can ask isn't "what are we planning this year?"

It's this: what are we shaping?

Because whether you're leading a choir, a workplace, a church, or a sports team, you're already shaping something.

The only real question is whether you'll do it by design, or by default.

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Emma Wheat is Co-Director of Sounds Joyful and MD at PRP Contemporary Voices, creating rooms where belonging is experienced first-hand through music, rhythm, and sound.

Rather than just talking about team culture, Sounds Joyful works directly with organisations to help teams live it, from standalone workplace music sessions to full-day workshops and immersive residential retreats.

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