Shape the culture you want to live in.
Answer five short questions. You'll get a simple brief on what to protect, what to address, and one ritual you can start this week.
Culture Brief
Team Culture — Where You Stand
What to Protect
The culture worth defending
What to Address
The thing you're tolerating that's sending a signal
The New Joiner Experience
What someone needs to feel in week one
The Ritual to Start
One repeated moment, made concrete
What the Team Needs
The feeling to design toward right now
One thing to do this week
Resources
A ritual library, a culture health checklist, and a planner to track what you're running. Open what you need.
Rituals work because they're repeated, not because they're elaborate. These are starting points — adapt the format, the frequency, the name. What matters is that they happen consistently.
Care
The Real Check-In
At the start of every 1:1, ask one question: "How are you actually doing?" Then wait. Don't fill the silence. Don't accept "fine." This ritual is about creating a space where people can be honest.
Weekly, in 1:1s. Takes 5 minutes. Costs nothing. The word "actually" matters — it signals you want a real answer.
Recognition
Specific Thanks
At the end of each week, send one message to one person naming something specific they did and why it mattered. Not "great job" — something you observed. "The way you handled the client call on Thursday changed the temperature in the room."
Weekly, every Friday. One message, one person, one specific thing. Rotate through the team over time.
Reflection
Sprint Close
End of every sprint or cycle: 10 minutes as a team. Each person names one thing that went well and one thing they'd do differently. No slides, no facilitation beyond asking. The repetition is what makes it land.
End of each sprint/cycle. 10 minutes maximum. Stand up format works well. Rotate who goes first.
Focus
The One Thing
At the start of each week, tell the team the single most important thing you're collectively trying to get done. Not a priority list — one thing. Then ask: what's getting in the way of that? This ritual combats the noise of urgency.
Monday mornings. Async or live. Five minutes or a Slack message. The discipline is the constraint: one thing, not three.
Care
The Welcome Moment
For every new joiner: before the end of their first week, every team member sends them one message — who they are, what they're working on, and one thing they're glad the new person will be part of. Not from the manager. From the team.
Once per new hire. Manager sets it up, team delivers it. Creates belonging before it has to be earned.
Reflection
The Story Worth Keeping
Once a month, in a team meeting, tell one story about a time the team was at its best — or invite someone else to tell one. Stories are how culture travels. This ritual makes the culture visible to itself.
Monthly. 5 minutes in a team meeting. Rotate who shares. Over time, the collection of stories becomes the team's identity.
Culture doesn't break at once — it drifts. These are the early signals to watch for, so you can act before drift becomes distance.
Signs your culture is holding
Early warning signals
Values only mean something when they're connected to specific behaviors. Here's how to make the translation.
The test
Can you describe the value as a behavior?
If your value is "integrity", ask: what does a person with integrity do differently in a meeting, under pressure, when no one is watching? If you can't describe it as something observable, it's not a value yet — it's a wish.
The reinforcement question
What did you celebrate this week — and why?
The behaviors you recognize publicly are the ones that spread. Before you send a recognition message, ask: is this aligned with who we say we are? Recognition shapes culture more than any values deck.
The tolerance test
What did you let pass this week?
Every tolerance sends a message. If someone behaved in a way that contradicts your values and you didn't name it — even quietly — the team noted that. Culture is as much about what you let go as what you protect.
The hiring filter
Can you identify your values in an interview?
For each value, have one scenario-based question ready: "Tell me about a time you had to choose between speed and quality. What did you do?" You're looking for evidence, not self-report. Anyone can say they value honesty.
When teams interact regularly, unspoken norms create friction. Making them explicit — even briefly — removes a surprising amount of noise.
Why norms drift
Every team has a different operating system
Engineering and marketing often have completely different expectations about response times, meeting formats, decision rights, and what "aligned" means. Neither is wrong. But when the operating systems clash without anyone naming it, frustration reads as personality conflict instead of process mismatch.
Before a cross-team project starts, run a 20-minute kickoff that asks: how do we like to communicate? What does "urgent" mean to each of us? Who makes what decisions?
How to set them
A shared norms conversation
Gather both teams (or leads) for a working session. Ask: what do we each need from this collaboration to do our best work? What are our biggest failure modes? What should we do when things go wrong? Write down what you agree. Keep it to one page. Revisit it if things get difficult.
Questions that work: "What does respectful disagreement look like in your team?" / "How do you prefer to be looped in on decisions?" / "What usually breaks down in cross-team work for you?"
The hardest norm to set
How you escalate without damaging the relationship
Agree in advance: if something isn’t working between teams, who talks to who, and how? Establishing an escalation path early means that when things go wrong, there’s a structure for it — and it doesn’t default to silence or politics.
"If either of us feels like the collaboration is breaking down, we talk to each other directly before it goes up the chain. Agreed?"
Culture is easiest to protect when you've named what you're protecting. These are the questions to help you identify your anchors — and think deliberately about what you want to carry forward as you grow.
Name your anchors
What does your culture actually depend on?
Not the values on the wall — the specific behaviors that, if they stopped, would make this a different place. For some teams it’s how decisions are made. For others it’s psychological safety, or how new people are welcomed, or how failure is handled. Name them explicitly. Things you don’t name, you can’t protect.
"If we had to name three things that make this team feel different from everywhere else, what would they be? Which of those is most at risk?"
The growth trap
Culture doesn’t scale automatically
What works for a team of 8 often breaks at 25. The rituals, the informality, the shared context — none of it transfers automatically. New people don’t absorb culture by proximity; they absorb it through deliberate acts: how they’re onboarded, what gets recognized, what their manager does in the first 90 days.
For every new hire you bring in, ask: what specifically will give them access to this culture? Don’t assume it’ll happen on its own.
When culture is under pressure
The moments that define it
Culture is most visible under pressure — a layoff, a missed target, a public failure, a difficult hire. What you do in those moments is more defining than any value statement. The question to ask in a crisis: are we acting in a way that we’d be proud to describe to a new joiner on their first day?
"How we handle this — the decision and the communication — will tell people more about who we are than anything else this year. Let’s be intentional about it."
Per team
Per ritual
Ritual Planner
One record per ritual you're running — what it is, why it matters, how it's going. Track it over time and reflect on what's changed. Saved in your Sessions.
Every quarter
Team Health Check
A quarterly snapshot of how the team is actually doing — psychological safety, energy, clarity, connection, feedback culture, workload. Rate each signal, name what’s strong, name what’s drifting, commit to one thing.