Don't watch the mouth, watch the hands.

Culture is a choice. Make sure it’s yours.

Conversations about organisational culture have a bad habit of descending into gobbledygook. Vision statements. Mission statements. Values statements.?

But statements are about what we say. Culture is about what we do. And specifically what we repeatedly do. How do we behave towards one another around here? How do we show up in our interactions with people outside the organisation? What do senior people in this organisation reward, praise and pay attention to??

There’s a scene in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse where Peter Parker teaches his young counterpart Miles Morales a lesson. Peter keeps Miles talking while surreptitiously freeing his hands from the ropes and cords Miles has used to tie him up. “Don’t watch the mouth”, he tells him afterwards, “watch the hands.” Leaders interested in shaping organisational culture need to follow the same advice.?

Here are seven things leaders can do, not just say about culture.?

One: Look in the mirror. Leaders set cultures. The best - and the worst - things about you are likely to end up reflected in your culture. To illustrate, I looked back at a 360 degree feedback exercise I did a couple of years before I started Rising, and picked out two fairly representative comments:

“I think your outputs are amongst the very best in the organisation. You don’t do things badly, half heartedly or (seemingly) in a rush. You somehow make this quality look effortless but I suspect there is an awful lot of graft under the surface.”

“You are quite circumspect. I think you can give the impression that you are less approachable than you actually are. I think your instinct is to play your cards quite close to your chest and work incredibly hard to achieve what you want to. But there is an awful lot to be gained from being explicit with others (especially more senior others) about what they can do to help you.”

I would say both of these things were true of me, and because they were true of me I think they’ve ended up being true of Rising. That commitment to quality in the first comment is encapsulated in the principle that “our first draft is never our final draft,” one of twelve that we talk about in The Rising Way (aka “The Purple Book”) that we give to new employees. The second comment I’m less proud of, and you won’t find it in that document, but if I’m honest it is just as true. Historically we have kept our cards quite close to our chest: although I’d like to think we’ve got better at it in recent years, we’ve not been that great at putting ourselves out there, telling our story and forging the relationships that can unlock new opportunities. Even internally, it took us (me) too long to put in place the kinds of communications routines to keep different teams and divisions informed and aligned about what was going on in the rest of the organisation.??

If the best - and the worst - things about you are likely to end up reflected in your culture, you’d better know what they are.

Two: Be consistent. Leaders set cultures. But not just top leaders. The organisational culture that is actually experienced by staff and customers depends on how leaders at every level behave and align. At Rising, we were lucky that we had a school before we had much of an organisation. Being forced to think about how we wanted our students to ultimately show up in the world - as the future workforce, the future citizens, the future leaders of their country - was enormously clarifying in helping us think about how we needed to show up as a whole organisation, at every level. That the language of the School Creed our students recite during morning assembly bears a striking resemblance to the language of the Rising Way is therefore not an accident. The healthiest organisational cultures are consistent, from the classroom to the boardroom.

The same goes within teams or divisions. It’s not enough to just pay attention to what the leader at the top is doing; you also need to pay attention to their lieutenants. Some years ago at Rising, a leadership succession in one of our country operations went badly awry and the culture, previously relatively healthy, devolved into a dysfunctional mess in the space of a few months. At first glance, the problem was appointing someone to the top job who was not a great culture fit. But by itself this would have been manageable. What turned out to be much more damaging was that, rather than stepping up to support the team and reinforce the culture in a difficult moment, the senior deputies in the team instead seized on the instability at the top as an opportunity to settle old scores and assert their own worldview. It created a culture within the culture that was profoundly damaging, and which took many months and considerable expense to undo. The lesson we learned is that while leaders set cultures, you need both the right leaders and the right lieutenants, especially when you are thinking about succession planning.

Three: Hire for culture. Most organisations are terrible at hiring , with more than half of new managerial hires failing within the first 18 months. Getting really good at hiring - or at least learning to be better than a dart-throwing chimpanzee - is therefore one of the most important and differentiating skills any CEO and founder can master. And it’s a skill that cascades: how people are hired shapes how they then approach hiring (did I mention that leaders set cultures?).?

Part of getting good at hiring is getting good at hiring for culture fit. I understand the worry that this risks groupthink and homogeneity, but I don’t agree. The more you can distil culture into a set of shared behaviours rather than just a set of abstract beliefs, the easier it is to hire for it in exactly the same, rigorous way as you test for other job-relevant skills and experience.

At Rising, we’re converts to the A Method . We like the volume and the richness of the data it provides with which to make hiring decisions - including on culture fit. For example, another of our twelve principles is the principle that “however well we do, we always strive to do better.” It’s eminently possible to test for that by asking job candidates to reflect not just on their achievements in each job but on their mistakes and lessons learned. (Top tip: not being able to think of any, or slipping into what ‘we’ got wrong instead of what ‘I’ got wrong, are red flags.) The hardest thing about hiring for culture is what happens when you have an urgent gap to fill. Being disciplined when you have reservations on culture fit is really hard in these moments but an absolute no brainer when you consider the costs of getting hiring wrong. One candidate, when asked during an interview to reflect on what aspects of the role they might struggle or need help with, said ‘I really can’t think of any’. Desperate to fill the hole, we appointed them anyway and almost immediately regretted it.?

To be honest, however good your hiring system gets, you won’t get it right every time. Which means that as well as hiring for culture you need to be ready to fire for it too. Even when you think you have a strong culture, it is shocking how quickly it can unravel with one or two of the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Moving swiftly to get people out of your organisation who pose a threat to its culture is easier said than done and may end up being expensive. But there are costs to having the wrong people on the bus, and in my experience they are nearly always higher than the costs of getting them off the bus.

Four: Describe before you prescribe. The purpose of culture documents is to hold a mirror up to your organisation and invite the question “is what we see what we expected and wanted to see?” In other words, the best culture documents start from description: who we actually are. An account grounded in recognisable, day-to-day truths. But too many culture documents start from prescription: who we want to be. If those fine words are untethered from people’s actual experience at work, it breeds cynicism from the get-go and undermines the whole exercise. I’m not opposed to writing things down, but your culture document should follow the creation of the culture, not precede it.

Five: Don’t feed it things for breakfast. I kind of hate the maxim “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It takes something true (that culture really matters) and stretches it till it’s not. Let me be blunt: if you have the wrong strategy, your organisation will fail, no matter how strong its culture is. On the (cough, various) occasions over the last ten years that Rising has been in mortal peril, the wrong strategy has nearly always been to blame, not the wrong culture. That culture is a force multiplier for strategy, that it’s likely to lead to better and more motivated teams and therefore better execution of strategy, that it can increase resilience and agility in the face of unexpected challenges to your strategy, sure. But let’s not get carried away.

Six: Never let a crisis go to waste. It’s said that crisis doesn’t build character, it reveals it. What’s true of individuals is true of organisations. Two crises, six years apart, did more to crystallize what we stood for at Rising than almost anything we did in-between times. The first was the Ebola epidemic, which swept across the Mano River region of West Africa the summer we were due to open our first school. We were new enough and small enough that it would have been easy to put our plans on ice and wait out the crisis. But our courageous group of founding teachers was adamant that just because school was out didn’t mean learning had to stop. For seven months they taught in front rooms, on patios and under trees. In doing so, they incarnated our first principle: that we are obsessed with student learning, and make sure it always comes first no matter what. Six years later, when another epidemic struck, that principle was a northstar. It was absolutely extraordinary to watch the speed with which our teams pivoted their entire model of delivery from face-to-face to distance learning over radio , establishing new channels of internal communication and coordination that I’m now stunned we ever managed to do without, and building partnerships that got our content into the hands of more than 30 organisations across more than 20 countries.

No leader would ever choose for their organisation to go through these crises, but once they are upon you, part of your responsibility is to lean on culture to shape your response, and in doing so help strengthen and reinforce culture when the waters recede. As I wrote in 2020, “the stories of what your organisation does during the crisis will echo down the years.” ??

Seven: Tell stories. “Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories”, writes Yuval Noah Harari. Part of what makes most culture documents so limp and lifeless is that they don’t think in stories, instead reaching for abstract nouns like “resilience” or “teamwork” that are shorn of all meaning.?

Stories are the oxygen of culture. If you want to keep culture alive, it needs a steady supply of stories. Every team meeting, every piece of communication, every interaction with a customer is a chance to collect these stories and retell them. In the Rising Way, we’ve told a few of our favourites. Tell yours.

This is the second in a series of ten pieces I’m releasing in 2024 to celebrate Rising’s tenth anniversary. You can find the first one here . Follow me on Medium , Twitter or LinkedIn to see the next ones.