What is company culture?

Culture is a set of shared beliefs and experiences - shared beliefs drive behavior standards, which drive experiences. Then, like a flywheel, those shared experiences reinforce the shared beliefs of the people in your company.

It’s possible for a small group of people to set company-wide culture - the beliefs have to be shared, but not necessarily by every employee in the company (at first). For example, 15 key leaders in an org of 100 with a tight range of beliefs, behaviors, and experiences can create, model, and lead the company culture.

There is no such thing as a weak culture - all companies have a culture with a strong pull. Where company culture can differentiate is whether it enhances performance, stagnates it, or erodes it. Culture is formed through:

1. The standards you set
2. The behaviors those standards drive (attitudes, actions, and words)
3. The interactions created by those behaviors
4. The experiences derived from those interactions

Where does company culture come from? Where do you exhibit your company culture?

Company culture originates from leaders - they’re the ones who set the standards, provide clarity, and establish what company culture should look like. They know the company’s goals best and can help identify the culture that will contribute to success. They’re also the ones responsible for cultural education, accountability, and development.

Company culture is lived by the employees - when a company reaches 30-50 employees, the center of cultural gravity shifts to employees. Leaders still own responsibility for the culture, but most touchpoints will be between teammates rather than with supervisors. Employees will embody the culture that they experience in those everyday interactions. So even if executives are at optimal cultural execution, an associate on the team could see suboptimal execution from peers, and begin to mirror it.

When should you define your company culture and create a culture playbook?

Do it as early as you can (as early as 3 people) - once you get three people on the team, there’s potential for one person to be excluded in a conversation. This adds urgency to honing your culture. But even solopreneurs can write out a playbook, if only to hold themselves to that standard.

Doing this early provides a reference point for crucial hires - early is better because those early hires are so crucial and the playbook can serve as a reference point for better hiring, retention, and development decisions.

Continue to audit your culture playbook as you grow - standards will shift, and what worked at 15 people won’t work at 50. When you enter a new stage with different leaders and standards pursuing a different mission, it helps to revisit and adjust your culture playbook so standards align with the new mission.

What is a culture playbook?

A culture playbook provides a structured guide to your culture - it outlines the shared beliefs, behavior standards, and experiences/outcomes that are present or desired within your company.

What are the benefits of creating a culture playbook?

It helps you articulate and disseminate shared cultural beliefs - similar to a sales or marketing playbook, it’s a tool for defining and sharing your cultural beliefs across the organization and for new hires. Many look at culture and values as fuzzy topics, but they’re crucial to business success. Outlining your beliefs and what they look like in action gives definition and practical value to your culture.

It defines how you act out your culture - the playbook should be more structured, systematic, and articulate than a traditional core value list—because if your cultural instruction is weak, then its execution will end up weak, disjointed, and disconnected. If how you act out your culture matters (and it does), then you need a playbook. The playbook format articulates the standards, parameters, do’s, don’ts, and hows of your culture that keep everyone from acting however they want.

What are the components of the playbook?

Section 1: Definition of Culture
What it is	A summary (often one page) of the company’s culture
Component 1: What is culture?	Don’t just put up “value words”, define them for your company. If you don’t define culture for everyone on the team, each employee will be left to define it themselves.
Component 2: What is the role and value of culture in business outcomes?	What function does culture play in your strategy, process, hiring, communication, development, leadership, and promotion? This gives culture a concrete foundation in the business and keeps it from being a fuzzy concept. If you can’t define this practically, take a step back until you can speak to why culture is important to the business and its success.
Component 3: What is an individual person’s responsibility for the company culture?	People tend to push responsibility for the culture onto others. They’re hired and see themselves as entering a culture, subject to it but not an owner of it. Clarifying that owning the culture is every teammate’s job is important to activating it. If individual people don’t take responsibility for the culture, then no one will, which causes real harm.

Section 2: Beliefs, Behaviors, and Outcomes (BBO)
What it is	This is the backbone of the playbook where you define what you want the culture to be. Define the beliefs you share, that create behaviors, that produce certain outcomes. These are the strong headlines, terminology, and reference points you hire for, fire for, and hold people’s action.
Component 1: Beliefs	What you believe in concise single-line statements. You want these to be punchy and evoke emotion. The sweet spot is three beliefs of 1-5 words each. The BBO should have a symmetry and flow across all the beliefs. In other words, the collection of beliefs you choose should comprise a system and paint a picture, fitting together rather than repeating each other or overlapping. Belief statements need to be direct, punchy, and informative, but don’t articulate the “how” or context. Big, emotionally evocative statements. Think of this like the “billboard”: high-aiming objectives and ideals stated in compelling fashion.
	Good example: “Personal Purpose” Bad example: “Respect everyone”
Component 2: Behaviors	These are the behavior standards that you’re looking for. Should be a single line, direct, actionable, and universally applicable in any (or most) situations. Have to be observable (an attitude can be observable), you need to be able to recognize when someone does or doesn’t do it. The standard needs to be as clear as possible, but not numerical in nature or limited to narrow specific contexts.
	Good example: “Talk to people, not about them.” Bad example: “Make 30 sales calls a day.”
Component 3: Outcomes	If you stay true to the beliefs and execute on the behaviors, what outcomes will you accomplish? They must have inherent enterprise value or employees won’t make the connection between the behaviors and the business results you’re after. Don’t use metrics that might change or outcomes with a shelf life or completion point. Because if you can accomplish your outcome once and for all, what becomes the purpose of those behaviors? Good outcomes represent areas of success you’ll never stop working towards.
	Good example: “Attract the best clients and grow revenue.” Bad example: “Get to $10M in revenue.”

BBO structure:

BBO structural tips:

• Use a 1:3:1 structure - for every one belief, have three behaviors leading to one outcome.
• Look at the BBOs as bidirectional - if you believe X, you’ll do Y behaviors and have Z outcomes. In reverse, if you want Z outcomes, you have to engage in Y behaviors, which require X beliefs.
• There should be a direct line between every behavior and meaningful business outcomes - Behaviors should show up in specific areas of your work, and ideally they have many touch points across your work.

Section 3: Talking Points
What it is	A living breathing document that can consistently be updated over time. These are an opportunity to add detail and context to expand on your initial core understandings without crowding the simplicity and punchiness of BBO.
Components	This can be as expansive or bulleted as you need it to be, and can include examples and practical questions.

Who should be involved in creating your culture playbook and defining your values?

Those who take responsibility for the culture standards, and their future impact, should be involved in their creation - the only people allowed to be creators of the culture are the people who will take responsibility for its shortcomings or failure. Typically this means the executive team creates the document. If a frontline contributor is on the creation committee, they’ll fight tooth and nail for ideas and execs will feel compelled to include their ideas, even when execs would prefer something else. You can end up including items that execs don’t want, and then who will raise their hand if that element fails? Everyone making creation decisions needs to have skin in the game for the results.

Culture creators can and should solicit ideas from other employees - anyone can contribute ideas for consideration to the playbook. Creators can go talk to anyone to source ideas, but shouldn’t hold themselves to including everyone’s ideas, they should focus on building a set of BBOs that will lead to operating the business at the highest possible level.

Keep the group small - ideally no more than ~6 people. The more people you add, the more opinions are in the mix and it leads to debate where people vouch for their ideas. The results can be a “Frankenstein” collection of ideas, aims, and standards as you try to make sure everyone’s ideas get included. The purpose is not to make sure everyone gets an idea in. The purpose is to select a set of behavior standards that help the business execute exceptionally well.

What makes a good culture value that drives results? What kind of values should you avoid?

Avoid overused ideas like integrity, trust, collaboration, or inclusivity - these values have been cheapened by overuse. Look at most value lists for Fortune 500 companies for examples of what not to do. Beginning with values everyone is using is a weak start to the process. You want your organization’s distinctive thumbprint on the playbook, not to repeat what everyone else claims.

Values should set a definitive standard that not everyone is willing to meet - the objective of the culture playbook is to be a culture clarifier and separator. People will either align with the standards and want to work this way or they won’t. Don’t try to define a culture that everyone can fit in. If no one can fall below the standard, then you haven’t really defined a culture.

What are the necessary steps to articulate your culture and create a playbook? How can a facilitator help?

Step	What happens
Initial belief dump	Take inventory of the beliefs currently driving your organization. Every business starts in a different place. Individually, creators should do a brain dump of the non-negotiables of the culture. Start with beliefs, because this causes you to investigate the underpinnings that drive how you act. I recommend doing this individually because then everyone shows up with their own beliefs and avoids groupthink. It also builds understanding between creators of their individual beliefs. Leaders may hold deep beliefs that don’t end up in the playbook, but now their peers will hear and acknowledge those beliefs.
Meeting 1: Beliefs	Work with a facilitator to organize the beliefs into categories. Categories you’ll often see include: How we execute, Attitude and Effort, How we interact with and treat each other. Then, you can get creative looking at the themes or words that occur often. You’ll play with words and articulations to chop a path through all the ideas you have. You’ll end the meeting with 2-3 options for beliefs that fall into each category and see how close you can get to articulating your core beliefs.
Meeting 2: Behaviors	You’ll break out into groups or individually write out the behaviors that fall into that belief category, trying to get 20 behaviors written out. From there, sharpen the list.   It’s helpful to ask here: “What’s the behavior, that if executed well, the other behaviors are natural consequences and byproducts of doing that one behavior well?” These are the gateway behaviors likely to end up in your BBO and talking points.   As you define your behaviors, you might find yourself going back to refine how you articulate the belief, and outcomes often also come out of this process.
Individual prioritization	Everyone goes through the list of beliefs and behaviors and makes the hard decisions to prioritize what are the headline beliefs that end up in the BBO, and what gets moved into the talking points.
Meeting 3: Codify the playbook	Arriving at the meeting with individual prioritizations, the group will discuss and negotiate the edits to get to the spot where you have 90% of a playbook written out.
Edits	The facilitator and creators will go through rounds of edits and exchanges to sharpen the final edits in the playbook until you end up with a BBO that feels true to your identity, slightly aspirational, and a strong set of standards to improve core business operations.

What’s the role of a facilitator in the playbook creation process?

As an experienced outsider, a facilitator can help:

• Articulate the culture evocatively to make the playbook more “emotionally sticky”
• Make sure that creators don’t build emotional attachments to their own ideas
• Hold the team to the playbook structure
• Avoid redundancy (restating the same beliefs or behaviors in two places using different words)

What are the most important things to get right?

If you want it to be understood and shared, define and establish a very clear standard - if there’s room to debate it, you’ll get caught in debates trying to enforce the culture without the playbook to back you up, and you can’t hold people responsible for what’s not defined.

Create a cohesive flow to the playbook - it should have some story to it. You don’t want to end up with isolated ideas—the BBO should be like a puzzle where each piece fits in a specific spot and the BBO would be incomplete without any individual piece.

Make sure you recognize your company in the playbook - you should see your company or at least the aspirational version of it in the playbook. It needs to be reflective of the “you” that you’re stringing toward or the “you” with a little bit of a stretch.

What are the common pitfalls?

Trying to write a culture that everyone fits into - establish clear standards that aren’t preexisting or feeble. If you set a standard, people are going to push back against it, so you might as well set standards you actually want to fight really hard to get to.

Including too many people in the creation of the playbook - don’t include people who will fight for their perspective over the net good of the business, or who won’t take responsibility if the culture fails.

Using trite values and opening the door for varying definitions - people believe their own interpretations of common cliches over the definition you’re pushing. Don’t let the audience define the culture. Define the culture standards for your audience.

Using overstuffed definitions of beliefs - don’t try to make the definition account for every single iteration of that belief that could possibly exist. Be direct about what you mean, clear, and concise with fewer words, not more. This isn’t an exercise in being comprehensive.

For more information or to connect with the Rallyday team, reach out to Padraic McConville at 415-385-4714 or Padraic@rallydaypartners.com