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I believe it’s the leader’s job to shape culture. What’s culture? It’s “the way we do things around here”. It’s the way we talk to each other, the way we send emails, the way we run meetings. It’s how we greet one another. It’s whether we treat one another like emotionless robots and say “leave your unprofessional emotions at home” or whether we say, “let’s connect in our humanity.”
One of my favourite definitions of leadership is that leaders create the conditions in which people can thrive. In other words, they create healthy culture (the opposite of toxic culture!) in which people can feel not only comfortable and accepted but celebrated. In this “safe container”, people can contribute creative ideas without fear of punishment. They can bring their whole self to work. They can ask the difficult questions like, “Are we acting in integrity with those values we wrote on the wall?” In strong cultures, people continue to learn, grow, develop both personally and professionally.
Contents
- Books about Developing Healthy Cultures
- An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.
- Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.
- Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company, by Kevin Oakes.
- Turn The Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders, by L. David Marquet
- What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, by Ben Horowitz
- The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle
- Articles and Videos about Building Great Culture
- Edgar Shein’s Culture Model (Foundational Article)
- “Change is more like adding milk to coffee” by Niels Pflaeging (Article)
- Broken Windows Theory (Article)
- 4 Steps to a More Successful Onboarding Program (Article)
- College Basketball Artifacts Case Study (Article)
- Find Cultural Exemplars and celebrate them: ARCTERYX Video (Usha the First)
Books about Developing Healthy Cultures
An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.
This book is objectively great, and it’s also one of my favourites because it hit me at just the right time for it to have a huge impact on the way I view leadership.
Kegan and Lahey are Harvard professors and researchers, and they have worked as consultants with tons of top companies that you have definitely heard of.
An Everyone Culture argues that organizations do best when they build an environment that encourages constant personal development among their employees. This begins with believing that people are even capable of learning, and aren’t just locked into a certain way of being or way of viewing the world that they adopted sometime in early adulthood.
The context of the book comes from the finding that most people in most organizations are doing a “second job” that nobody is paying them for: spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.
Organizations are paying people to work full time, but only getting a part-time amount of work from them due to all the time and effort going into the second job. The writeup on Amazon asks, “What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone, not just select ‘high potentials’ could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?”
Then they talk about a small number of great organizations who are actually doing this. These companies are great not in spite of being human-focused but because they are human-focused. The book gets super practical – what are the norms and habits that are going on in these companies? You’ll come away a believer, with tons of new practices to choose from that will help you create that same environment
Click here for more: a Harvard Business Review article by the authors, a detailed description of An Everyone Culture, and a book summary and a podcast episode.
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.
I won’t go on and on about this one because it’s written by the same authors as above.
Change is hard. Culture change is hard. Leading change is hard. Even if the status quo is terrible, it’s just so potent! This book is all about overcoming resistance to change, a lot of which is subconscious. They argue that when leaders can pinpoint and uproot our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.
Bonus:
- Brené Brown on her Dare to Lead podcast talking with author Lisa Laskow Lahey about overcoming our immunity to change.
- Lisa Lahey giving a 10-min workshop entitled “A Tool for Humanity: Immunity to Change”.
Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company, by Kevin Oakes.
Similar to Immunity to Change, this book starts by acknowledging that almost every effort to change culture fails. He argues that the approach is all wrong:
Rather than attempt to “transform” a new culture from the ground up, leaders need to instead spearhead a culture renovation. It’s all about keeping what works, changing what needs to be changed, and ensuring proper care and maintenance―much like refurbishing and living in a beautiful historic home and improving its overall value.
This is a playbook. It’s so practical. So, so practical. It might be the only book on culture change you’ll ever need? Even Brené Brown thinks so, and you can get a great overview in her podcast episode where she interviews Kevin Oakes on the book.
Bonus materials:
Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture, podcast episode by Brené Brown. She did this episode as a follow up to her episode with Dr. Donald Sull and Charlie Sull about their article in the MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation.”
Turn The Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders, by L. David Marquet
First of all, I have to say how much I love the subtitle of this book: turning followers into leaders. I define leadership very broadly: it’s influencing people. That can happen regardless of your level in the organization.
When Marquet took over the worst-performing boat in the fleet, he didn’t really even know anything about nuclear submarines. Which was probably a good thing, in the end!
“Trained to give orders in the traditional model of ‘know all–tell all’ leadership…he almost immediately ran into trouble when he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why, the answer was: ‘Because you told me to.’ Marquet realized that while he had been trained for a different submarine, his crew had been trained to do what they were told—a deadly combination.
This book “reveals how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy’s traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, Marquet instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control to his subordinates, and creating leaders.”
SPOILER ALERT: From poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention rate in the fleet, Sante Fe set records for performance, morale, and retention. And over the next decade, a highly disproportionate number of the officers of the Santa Fe were selected to become submarine commanders.
Turn the Ship Around | L. David Marquet | Talks at Google
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, by Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times.
Ben Horowitz has long been fascinated by history, and particularly by how people behave differently than you’d expect. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his attention to a question crucial to every organization: how do you create and sustain the culture you want?
To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake.
What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building—the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.
“Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.”
YouTube interview with the author, Ben Horowitz
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle
In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world’s most successful organizations—including Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, and U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six—and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation, and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind.
Drawing on examples that range from Internet retailer Zappos to the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade to a daring gang of jewel thieves, Coyle offers specific strategies that trigger learning, spark collaboration, build trust, and drive positive change. Coyle unearths helpful stories of failure that illustrate what not to do, troubleshoots common pitfalls, and shares advice about reforming a toxic culture.
Combining leading-edge science, on-the-ground insights from world-class leaders, and practical ideas for action, The Culture Code offers a roadmap for creating an environment where innovation flourishes, problems get solved, and expectations are exceeded.
Culture is not something you are—it’s something you do. The Culture Code puts the power in your hands. No matter the size of the group or the goal, this book can teach you the principles of cultural chemistry that transform individuals into teams that can accomplish amazing things together.
Articles and Videos about Building Great Culture
Edgar Shein’s Culture Model (Foundational Article)
Edgar Schein (1928–2023) was a Swiss-born American psychologist and organizational theorist known for his pioneering work in organizational culture, leadership, and career development. He was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and made significant contributions to the field of organizational behavior.
Key Contributions:
- Organizational Culture Model – Schein identified three levels of organizational culture:
- Artifacts (visible structures, processes, and behaviors)
- Espoused Values (stated norms, values, and beliefs)
- Basic Underlying Assumptions (deeply embedded, unconscious beliefs)
- Process Consultation – He emphasized the importance of helping organizations diagnose and solve their own problems rather than imposing solutions.
- Humble Inquiry – He advocated for a leadership style based on asking questions and fostering open communication rather than simply giving orders.
- Career Anchors – Schein developed the concept of career anchors, which describes the deep-seated values and motivations that guide individuals in their professional lives.
His work has been highly influential in management, HR, and leadership development, shaping how organizations understand and improve their cultures.
“Change is more like adding milk to coffee” by Niels Pflaeging (Article)
Some people believe that culture change is a matter of “thawing out” the existing culture, meddling with it, and then freezing it back into shape. I am not one of those people.
I believe that culture is constantly shifting and evolving, like a murmuration of starlings. Each member of the flock can affect the entire group.
And so does Niels Pflaeging!
Instead of seeing it as a slow, step-by-step process, Pflaeging argues that real transformation happens quickly and systemically—more like milk instantly mixing into coffee than a long, drawn-out journey.
Main points:
- Change isn’t linear; it happens in flips and shifts.
- Every action in an organization can trigger change.
- People don’t actually resist change—they resist bad change management.
- The real challenge is fixing systemic issues, not just convincing individuals.
- Organizational change is all about relationships and social dynamics.
Basically, if change feels hard, it might be because the approach is off. Instead of forcing it, leaders should focus on making adjustments that naturally reshape the system—just like milk effortlessly blends into coffee.
Broken Windows Theory (Article)
Pay very close attention to cultural artifacts, because they sent a powerful message! “The broken windows are a metaphor for any visible sign of disorder in an environment that goes untended. This may include small crimes, acts of vandalism, drunken or disorderly conduct, etc. Being forced to confront minor problems can heavily influence how people feel about their environment, particularly their sense of safety.”
What are the broken windows in your organization’s culture? What’s the office design like? Dress code? Branding and logos? Is the workplace tidy? How do emails look and feel? Do people greet one another or walk by with eyes averted?
“The broken windows theory, defined in 1982 by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, drawing on earlier research by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, argues that no matter how rich or poor a neighborhood, one broken window would soon lead to many more windows being broken: “One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” Disorder increases levels of fear among citizens, which leads them to withdraw from the community and decrease participation in informal social control.”
4 Steps to a More Successful Onboarding Program (Article)
How do you know your organization’s culture? Ask your newest member what they need to do to “fit in around here.” Humans are social beings and very attuned to the subtle messages they are receiving. What do they have to wear? Where should they eat lunch? Who are they allowed to talk to? People start answering these questions very quickly.
A comprehensive onboarding process is so key to enhancing employee engagement and retention. This article argues that effective onboarding begins during the interview phase, where it’s crucial to ensure candidates understand the company culture and feel aligned with it. Once an offer is accepted, maintaining communication and providing necessary resources before the first day can create excitement and preparedness in new hires.
On the first day, focusing on meaningful experiences and interactions, such as personalized welcomes and introductions, helps new employees feel valued. The first week is so important to setting clear expectations and fostering relationships within and across departments.
Extending onboarding activities beyond the initial period, with regular check-ins and feedback opportunities, ensures continued support and integration into the company culture.
College Basketball Artifacts Case Study (Article)
Matt Lynch became the head coach of the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie men’s basketball team, the absolute worst team in the league.
Despite limited resources and minimal recognition, Lynch has transformed the program into a formidable force in junior college basketball.
To demonstrate how much he valued the players, and set a powerful tone for the culture he wanted to created, Lynch went above and beyond:
“He gut renovated the men’s basketball locker room over the summer, ripping out dilapidated carpet with a box cutter and taking a sledgehammer to a broken pool table. His mother, sister and brother arrived to slap fresh paint on the lockers and cinder block walls; he scavenged leather sofas to replace the ratty one he inherited; and he scrounged new carpet, blinds, a full-length mirror, a dry-erase board and a television on the cheap. A built-in bookcase is filled with framed family photos of every player and coach, and the flag of each player’s home country hangs over his locker.
Spoiler alert: his innovative coaching strategies and unwavering commitment have not only led to a significant improvement in the team’s performance but have also provided his players with opportunities to advance to higher levels of competition.
Find Cultural Exemplars and celebrate them: ARCTERYX Video (Usha the First)
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Annalise 