Culture isn’t soft—it’s structural. It’s the quiet system that runs everything
I’ve had the pleasure of leading several roundtables with tech leaders recently, and two themes kept surfacing: first, culture isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. Yes, you’ve probably heard that a thousand times.
Second, if you aren’t shaping your intentionally, it’s shaping you.
You may not have heard that one as often.
Whether you’re leading tech innovation or people strategy, your culture is shaping every decision, every interaction, and every outcome—whether you designed it or not. To bring a little more intention to shaping your culture, try these three tips:
- Lead Emotionally through Change
- Make Values Clear and Actionable
- Consistently Model What Matters
Lead Emotionally through Change
Wendy Moore, founder and CEO of Eleve Talent, emphasizes that leaders must embrace the emotional baggage each person brings to their experience of change:
As we think about how to lead through change and retain culture, understand that everybody is going to come at that with their own baggage, their own experiences, their own perspective. The leadership trying to lead through that change has to embrace that, not resist it. They must understand that each person is going to take their own time and come at it with their own way. It’s going to have an impact on different humans differently, and that’s okay.
Esther Derby, author and agile consultant, has a favorite hack for helping with this:
Say to someone, ‘I really appreciate that you picked up that task when I was overwhelmed.’ It builds connection, reinforces behavior, and creates trust.
These small acts of recognition aren’t fluff. They’re infrastructure. They build trust. And that allows teams to tackle hard things together. As Wendy notes:
When you build that sort of base; when you have that connection and you realize, “I’m valued as a person, this person does value me,” when a conflict does come up, you’ve got some ground to stand on. It’s not some person coming to criticize you, it’s someone who values you, who is interested in having a conversation about making something work better for both of you. It really changes the dynamic of things.
Build trust before you build change.
💡 Ask yourself: What’s one behavior you’ve appreciated this week? Let the person know.
➡ Help yourself and your team navigate change by using the Satir Change Model.
➡ Use this simple template for your appreciations—and be careful not to peanut butter them around.
Make Values Clear and Actionable
High-performing companies often use a few concise, straightforward statements to guide their culture. Zapier, for example, has held five values sacred throughout its fourteen years:
- Default to Action
- Default to Transparency
- Empathy over Ego
- Build the Robot, Don’t be the Robot
- Grow through Feedback
These rules help people make decisions and reduce cognitive load. They make the culture legible. As Jay Floyd, one of Zapier’s data leaders, relates:
I’ve never worked at a company where the values were more than just words on the wall. But we literally are espousing these values constantly. We are challenging ourselves. If I’m having a tough time, am I doing these five values? Because if I’m doing them, I’m probably going to get myself out of this tough time. We have literally built an intentional way to design our culture and question everything that we do.
Another benefit of these simple declarations of “how we do things around here” is the clarity they give people. These rules don’t just guide decisions; they shape identity. Rebecca Parsons, former CTO of Thoughtworks, notes that:
Some people are very good at following a recipe and doing what they know how to do. “I know this is what good looks like, and I know how to do this.” And they completely freak out if, all of sudden, you take the recipe away from them and say, “Just go do it.” “No, I can’t”. Some people just are not wired that way. That kind of person would be very uncomfortable in a free-for-all, innovative, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, fail-fast kind of environment.
Ross Smith, the worldwide support leader of Microsoft’s new AI First team, describes his experience in building a “just go do it” team within a “follow the recipe” culture:
Our AI First team is located in Microsoft Customer Support. As we were recruiting, I was very clear up front that this is a startup mentality. The technology is moving very quickly. It’s ambiguous. There’s not a lot of direction. It’s going to be a lot of experimentation, freedom to fail, freedom to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, and you’re just kind of on your own, exploring. Now, a lot of our folks came from the world of customer support, which is very measurable. How many cases do you take a week? What is your average throughput? What is your customer satisfaction ratings? Lots of red, green, yellow boxes every week, that they know exactly where they’re headed, how they did. So I was very clear about that upfront. “This is going to be very different.” I had a few people say, “That’s not for me. I like the red, green, yellow, knowing where I stand.” As a result, the people that we have on the team, it’s a very strong, experimental, curious, innovation-seeking culture, because we were clear up front.
Make your values usable, not just visible.
💡 In your next team meeting, ask, “What’s one thing we’re reinforcing that we’d rather not?”
➡ Work with your teams to map everyone’s preferences for communicating (try this or this or this), then discuss how these suggest updating your working agreements.
Consistently Model What Matters
Wendy emphasizes that modeling behavior is the most powerful tool leaders have:
“It’s all the little moments that a team has behind the scenes, in front of clients…those human interactions on a day-to-day basis, and the good and the bad. You can say it all day, but if leadership isn’t showcasing it, it won’t translate.”
Jordan Stone, vice president of engineering at Paytient, provides a concrete example:
You have that skip level, or you have that meeting where you encourage folks to challenge you. You’ve got to take action on that. You’ve got to close the loop and follow up. Say, “Are you noticing changes from that?” In our developer experience survey, which we started running quarterly, the question I am probably the most focused on, out of the fifty-something questions in that survey: Do you fit? Do you notice changes from your feedback from the last survey? If that’s not constantly up into the right, I don’t feel like as a leadership team establishing that culture that we’re doing enough to make people feel comfortable, that they can bring those concerns or challenge us, whether it’s directly or indirectly.
Culture is what people see in action. It’s how leaders respond to feedback, how they handle conflict, how they celebrate wins.
How they handle members of the team who conflict with the culture.
Esther warns that hiring for skills without cultural alignment can quietly erode everything you’ve built:
They fill functional roles with people who are entirely capable of doing those functional roles as the company is growing, but they don’t have an alignment with the values and culture that they’re trying to create, so they might actually be undermining it. Those hiring mistakes come up again and again when I talk to executives. Once you realize that someone may be a competent vice president of marketing, but he’s destroying the culture, or she is destroying the culture, you gotta cut ties. Hiring not just for functional or technical skills, but also looking for people who are compatible with what you’re trying to create. They don’t have to be exactly the same. No one’s ever exactly the same. But they have to be compatible.
Hiring for culture fit doesn’t mean hiring clones. It means hiring for compatibility with your values, your way of working, your decision-making defaults.
💡 Reflect: What’s one behavior you’ve modeled this week that reinforces your culture?
➡ Identify what is working well and what could work better by using the Perfection Game.
➡ Use Causal Loop Diagrams to map the cycles and systems affecting your culture.
Culture Is the Hack that Accelerates Everything Else
Culture is the bedrock upon which your business is built.
Jeff Griffiths, managing director and co-founder of Workforce Strategies International, reminds us of Peter Drucker’s famous saying: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
It still does, always did. Leaders often get bogged down on strategy. They need to focus first and foremost on the culture, because the strategy will evolve on its own, and the good people will figure it out. But the way they go about getting there, that’s the culture.
Johanna Rothman, author and consultant who you might know as the Pragmatic Manager, puts it this way:
When we are deliberate about our culture, that’s actually the formulation of our strategy. When we focus on the individual people and their health and safety, we create an organization that can work for everybody.
Culture is the quiet system that runs everything. Make it intentional.
🎯 Emotional intelligence is key during change.
🎯 Simple rules make culture legible.
🎯 You must model the culture they want.
🎯 A strong culture produces a strong company.
Culture isn’t just a side project. It’s the system that runs everything. Ready to lead with intention?
Join our next roundtable. These are intimate events that bring together smart, talented leaders for meaningful conversations and connections. I’m always fascinated by the diverse viewpoints my guests bring. And, especially, by the passion they have for helping their teams and their clients build uncommon cultures.
Let’s build something uncommon—together. Schedule a premeet here.
Gratitudes
Thanks to everyone who participated in this round of culture roundtables:
- Wendy Moore and Esther Derby. I brought them together because of their deep experience understanding, changing, and especially sustaining culture. (recording)
- Jeff Griffiths, Johanna Rothman, Rebecca Parsons, Ross Smith. I brought them together because they are each experienced people leaders who know the tech is just the surface symptom. (recording)
- Jay Floyd, Johanna Rothman, Jordan Stone. I brought them together not because their names all start with “J”—because they are each well-practiced in the tech leadership space, never quite the person ultimately in change, and always the person to whom that person listens. (recording)
If you’d like to hear more from these amazing people, check out our podcast episodes:
- Esther Derby: Leverage the Space
- Jay Floyd: Feed Your Good Wolf
- Jeff Griffiths: Work Beyond the Process
- Johanna Rothman: Catch People Doing Something Right
- Rebecca Parsons: The Unconventional Secret to Authentic Leadership
- Wendy Moore: Celebration Builds Trust