The Mundane Building Blocks of a Great Corporate Culture

​In the last TL;DR newsletter, I shared some very brief commentary and a link to an exhaustive new blog post around resetting team culture. Instead of being uncharacteristically brief this time, I wanted to unpack a big "why should you care" reason for crafting a leadership mandate.

TL;DR You can't directly change a team culture.

I had a client recently share the results from their team offsite where they created a leadership mandate. Some of the words he used to describe the conversations: raw, authentic, constructive, important.

These are great adjectives for leadership conversations! When was the last time you had a leadership meeting that was raw AND constructive?!

My guide on resetting team culture (The Comprehensive Guide To Resetting A Team Culture) sprang from working with that client. We had a series of in-depth discussions to ensure the team was able to have those "raw, authentic, constructive, important" conversations, but there was a key idea from those talks that I wanted to share with all of you:

Culture is a second order outcome of mundane things done well.

What I mean by that statement is that you can't "do a culture thing" and expect it to really change a team culture, and certainly not for an extended period of time. A fundatory Zoom Happy Hour or a blowout Christmas Party won't make your business a great place to work.

Culture, or "how we do things around here," is built through little moments in a typical workday/week/month/quarter/year. Things like team meetings, lunchtime conversations, chatter in a Slack channel, Friday retrospectives, a monthly All Hands, quarterly kickoffs, annual reviews...all these rituals are like support beams that hold up a corporate culture.

If those small mundane rituals are crappy, you've got a crappy culture.

A leadership mandate is kind of like a schematic for all those support beams:

• What behaviors are ok and what ones are not ok?
• How do we resolve conflict gracefully?
• What's our North Star when we lose our way?
• How should we show up for each other, especially when a colleague is experiencing major frustrations?

However, even if a leadership team can create a killer leadership mandate, it won't do much unless it's implemented in day-to-day life. This is where most teams fall down.

Implementing a new normal is hard and it takes practice. Improving a simple weekly meeting may take a month or so until old behaviors are eliminated and new ones are motor memory.

Not only that, but your mandate should evolve and calibrate as you discover new information through practical applications. What seemed like a good idea may actually cause unforeseen consequences when you're actually sitting around the conference room table...so you gotta practice sitting down at the table and following the leadership mandate!

If you're looking for more raw, authentic, constructive, and important conversations at your business, pop into my calendar and let's chat culture.

A TL;DR from the CRO

Culture, like street sweeping trucks, require constant attention.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

April 25th: TechCrunch Early Stage

Are you headed to TechCrunch Early Stage in Boston on April 25th? I'll be there: find me and I'll feature you in the next TL;DR! I'll be sporting some fresh Learn to Scale swag:

​I'm doing the 30-Day Question Challenge with my Accountabilibuddy Alycia and one question gave me a mini-mental breakdown:

If you could have a conversation with your future self 10 years from now, what advice or insights do you think your future self would offer you based on their experiences and wisdom?

I lost my marbles with this one because I HAD to do a very Dan-like thing with the recording: schedule send the transcript 10 years into the future using FutureMe.

That's a lot of pressure not to say something dumb. I don't want 10-year-older Dan to think I was an idiot. He's an older and wiser person than me...I hope! What if he's dumber than Today-Dan?! What if he's dumber because I didn't work hard enough at the 30 Day Question challenge?

(And this is how my little breakdown began.)

Trying to impress myself,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

​Opt-out from the newsletter | Unsubscribe from all emails | Update your Preferences | www.learntoscale.us, Boston, MA 02119

​PS. Hey, Dan from 10 Years From Now, this is the bleeding edge of AI-generated video. Are you impressed?​