How to scale a cultural movement

Culture by Design, by David J. Friedman , is an excellent book for those interested in creating a high-performance organization through more intentional focus on your culture and the behaviors that define it.? While the book takes a broad lens for why focusing on culture enhances organizational effectiveness, the insights shared in the book are highly relevant for those looking to reinforce a more customer-driven culture.?

I’m not going to take up your time in this review sharing statistics for why focusing on culture is important, and why culture is the responsibility of all leaders, not just those in HR.? The fact that you are reading this review for Culture by Design shows you already buy into this.? If you’re looking for more evidence, read the full book or check out some of my other book reviews here or my podcasts here .

Friedman emphasizes that culture is about behavior and reinforcing the right habits throughout your organization.? He makes the powerful observation that while many talk about the importance of culture, they leave things at too high a level and don’t develop tangible initiatives to drive adoption of the right behaviors across their organization.? This is typically because they put the emphasis on their organization’s mission, vision, and values and don’t take the time to define the behaviors that they want more of to energize the culture.? My own learning journey helping companies reinforce the connection between culture and customer experience has also taught me to focus on behaviors.

Culture by Design is organized around 8 steps that are illustrated in a wheel on the book’s cover, where two are at the center of the wheel, given their importance, and the other six are organized around the wheel to illustrate a continuous improvement cycle.? The two steps at the center of the wheel are to define your cultural behaviors and to ritualize them.? The six steps around the wheel are to select, integrate, communicate, coach, lead, and drive the behaviors.

In this book review, I’ll summarize key insights for each of the 8 steps.? I’ll also share further thoughts on how you can build beyond the approach laid out in the book to drive even more impact from your efforts.? ?I’ll dive deeper into three places you can focus that complement rather than replace the great insights in the book:

1.??Make a stronger connection between your prioritized cultural behaviors and the emotions that you’d like customers and employees to feel.? Emotions are what make peaks in their journeys more meaningful and memorable.

2.??Beyond rituals, look for ways to help people make commitments to practice specific behaviors so that they transition from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence, turning your prioritized behaviors into stronger habits.

3.??Evolve your customer and employee listening efforts to reinforce this connection to emotions and behaviors.? Use them as a mirror you hold up to get people to make commitments to practice behaviors and to provide feedback on how they’re doing.

?Let’s dive into each of the 8 steps in turn, then revisit these 3 additional focus areas that build on the great insights from the book.?

Step 1: Define the employee behaviors that drive your success?

In his first book, Fundamentally Different, Friedman used values and behaviors more interchangeably.? The subtitle of his first book was “Building a culture of success through organizational values.”? ?Fundamentally Different got us part of the way there, recognizing that values such as integrity and quality are contextual clues in a culture that govern our actions.? In his second book, Culture by Design, Friedman reinforces the importance of translating your values into behaviors that are adopted widely within the organization.

Friedman points out that values, while important, tend to remain at a higher, aspirational level, and are more abstract.? Engaging your people about what behaviors you’d like them to practice requires elaboration to make them more action oriented.? Focusing on behaviors makes it easier to provide tangible, pragmatic feedback to coach your employees.? You value something, then demonstrate your commitment to that value through behaviors.?

It's not surprising then that the first step at the core of Friedman’s 8-step process for Culture by Design is to define the specific behaviors you want more of across your organization.? While Friedman calls out the linkage between values and behaviors, he doesn’t recommend that you necessarily start with values in developing a more specific set of behaviors to put into action.? This is because using your values as a jumping off point may constrain your thinking.? In his experience, if you develop a broader list of behaviors unconstrained by your values, about 85% of the behaviors will overlap the list that you would have developed if you’d focused on only those behaviors more closely linked to your values.? By taking an unconstrained approach you are likely to find additional behaviors to focus on that you would have missed.

Similarly, if you start your culture efforts looking more narrowly at a specific cornerstone discipline like Quality Management, Human Centered Design, or Agile Product Management, you’d identify a set of valuable behaviors but would miss some that have broader applicability within the organization than those that rise to the top through that narrower lens.? This is an important point and one to consider as you plan out the journey your company is on and how to drive the right change management plan.? Does it make sense to start broader and then increase focus on a specific cornerstone discipline to drive adoption and showcase success, coming back to a broader lens over your change roadmap?? Or should you start narrower in defining the behaviors and then broaden them over time later?? In his book Friedman focuses on keeping a broader lens.? As I’ll come back to later in this book review, that may limit the impact your culture efforts have if they remain too broad based, and you never translate them into more focused and programmatic ways to energize and sustain your change management efforts on your company’s journey.

Friedman suggests that you develop a list of between 20-40 cultural behaviors.? The list is longer to help employees understand exactly what each behavior really means in the day-to-day context of their jobs.? For example, here are three distinct behaviors for effective communication that are typically broken out:

·????? Listen generously

·????? Speak straight

·????? Get clear on expectations

Friedman does acknowledge that a subset of your longer list of behaviors will be most relevant to specific groups of employees for things like performance reviews.? As we’ll see in the next section on ritualizing behaviors, the length of the list is not what’s important, given you don’t need to memorize them.

Step 2: Ritualize the practice of your fundamentals

Friedman puts ritualization at the center of the wheel together with defining the behaviors, because embedding your prioritized behaviors within existing rituals makes it more likely they will be adopted as habits.? In my last book review of Atomic Habits , by James Clear , we looked at how practicing a behavior at the same time and same place makes it more likely you will be successful at making the behavior sticky.? Atomic Habits also emphasizes the value of habit stacking, where you combine new behaviors with existing ones to tap into well-established triggers and reward systems.? Both are reasons why embedding your cultural behaviors within existing rituals makes it more likely they will get adopted more broadly.

A ritual is itself a habit, a behavior that you do over and over until it becomes reflexive and second nature.? Once it’s a ritual, you do it unconsciously whenever the context calls for it.? For example, Ritz Carlton is famous for the way it reinforces it’s Ritz Carlton Basics through the ~10-minute daily line ups that it’s ~40K people do at the start of every shift.? Ritz Carlton repeats each of the 20 behaviors that make up the Ritz Carlton Basics in sequence until it reaches the end, then repeats the process all over again.? Shining a light on the Basics keeps them top of mind for all employees, while providing a safe space for employees to elaborate and share stories with one another.? It also reinforces the “clue consciousness” of employees to spot and act on clues, reinforcing the connection between culture and CX.? For more on how to activate the clue consciousness of your organization, see my review for Clued In by Lou (Lewis) Carbone here and my podcast with Lou here (episode 5).?

Friedman acknowledges that using daily standups as a ritual won’t work for all organizations, though it will work for many.? He suggests broadening the ritual to other meetings where you consistently start them with someone talking about the behavior and sharing a story.? Many companies do this with “value shares” to reinforce their company’s mission, vision, and values, but don’t make this specific enough at the level of behaviors.?

Friedman also suggests amplifying the focus on a specific behavior (which he calls Fundamentals) each week through a communication to all employees that sets up that week’s Fundamental.? He also recommends that this starts from the CEO, then cascades to other leaders that take turns rotating through the Fundamentals to demonstrate leaders’ commitment to the culture and the behaviors that you’ve prioritized.? This cycle can continue for years, enrolling an expanding set of leaders to keep it fresh.?

Embedding discussion of the behaviors in existing rituals like daily standups or other business meetings is one way to keep them top of mind and encourage reps among employees.? The other six steps in the wheel further reinforce teaching and coaching for your behaviors.? Friedman encourages a more holistic approach but puts ritual at the center of the wheel as it takes less psychic energy to get things moving if you stack habits.

Step 3: Select people who are the right fit for your culture

The third step in the wheel is to be more systematic in hiring people with the right cultural fit.? You can teach skills more easily than you can change peoples’ value systems.? It’s not that you can’t get people to modify their behavior, it’s just that it takes a lot more energy than it does to amplify people’s existing behaviors.? As Friedman puts it, “if you take someone with a heart for service and put them in a culture that emphasizes service, that trait will blossom.? If you put them in a different environment that trait will get suppressed.”? If you hire or retain people that aren’t a good cultural fit because it’s expedient, it will sap peoples’ energy and make them less emotionally committed to the organization.

To assess cultural fit, Friedman recommends breaking your 20+ behaviors down into two groups.? The first is those that are more intrinsic, which tend to be part of someone’s nature, like always striving for the highest quality.? The second set of behaviors are those that are more coachable, like “practicing blameless problem solving.”? Then you can write interview questions that help assess cultural fit, asking people to tell stories where they’ve exemplified some of the more intrinsic behaviors.

Step 4: Integrate new hires into your culture

If you ask which of the “hire to retire” moments that matter for employee experience are most important, most people will include onboarding as one of the key ones to focus on.? Friedman agrees, though he prefers to call it integration rather than onboarding, as this conveys a stronger sense of getting people to become a close-knit team.

Despite the importance of integration, most companies pay more attention to recruiting than they do this moment in the employee journey.? They may also commit less leadership time to making sure this experience goes well and that there is intentional focus on showcasing your cultural behaviors during the integration experience.? Friedman suggests dedicating up to a week to the integration experience versus just a few hours.? He also provides some pragmatic recommendations to make the leadership experience more effective, making sure to provide detailed examples of how to put your behaviors into action, to provide content for why they matter to each employee, and to share details on the “logistics” that employees need to be aware of, which are the frequently asked questions that they would otherwise have to figure out on their own.? The integration experience not only provides information on your culture, but it also helps employees to feel more relaxed, comfortable and confident to contribute and be productive.? Friedman recognizes the importance of emotions to engineer peaks in your employee journey.

Step 5: Communicate your culture throughout the organization

Engaging potential employees about your culture upfront during interviews, making their integration into a memorable and engaging experience, and reinforcing your behaviors through regular rituals will provide a solid start to getting your employees to think about your prioritized cultural behaviors more regularly.? Friedman also calls out several other simple ways that you can amplify your prioritized behaviors.? One of the most used is to print out wallet-sized cards that employees carry with them, just as Ritz Carlton employees do.? Friedman calls these “way cards.”? In addition to way cards, some companies display them prominently on posters, electronic display boards, table-top flip books, or screen savers on employees’ computers.?

Simply communicating your full set of behaviors is not enough to drive lasting impact.? If everyday behavior isn’t congruent with what you are communicating, it undermines your change management efforts to build a cultural movement.? People are more receptive to coaching, the next step in the wheel, when they see that you are leading by example and that the organization authentically lives its values through widespread adoption of your behaviors.

Step 6: Coach to reinforce your culture

As people practice your behaviors to make them habits where they are unconsciously competent, there will be plenty of teachable moments for you and other leaders to coach them.? Your Fundamentals aren’t signs on the wall, they are meant to be how people respond in their interactions with customers and with other employees.? A good leader is a coach, spending time to explain and teach, not just expecting others to naturally identify and practice things on their own.? Giving people positive reinforcement when they exhibit the behaviors is good, but you also need to slow down and take advantage of teachable moments.? Friedman also shares an approach to scenario-based training so that you can practice in a safe space before putting the behaviors into practice in real life situations with greater confidence.

Step 7: Lead your culture by example

Coaching provides an opportunity to demonstrate caring and commitment to your employees’ development.? Leading by example reinforces your own commitment and will make them more receptive to your and others’ coaching.? It also provides an example for others to emulate.? Just like a social network has influencers within it, your organization has culture champions, whether formally or informally, that shape the behavior adoption of others within their relationship network.? You can proactively influence the way energy spreads in your culture by being intentional about how you tap into and activate employees’ relationship networks.

Friedman calls out the importance of CEO and other executive leaders to be on board and visibly demonstrate their commitment to building the cultural movement.? He also emphasizes that the way you handle moments when you fall short yourself is key to demonstrating the authenticity of your commitment to the culture.? When you recognize you’ve missed an opportunity to practice one of your behaviors, demonstrate humility and transparency to talk about it and show how you are changing your behavior and learning from experience.? Encourage others to do the same and you’ll create an environment where everyone can learn and grow together as you build a stronger cultural movement.

Step 8: Drive your culture through accountability

Just as coaching reinforces your ongoing commitment, so does creating accountability.? Tracking behaviors in surveys is one step towards accountability, but only if you visibly share and act on the insights.? Embedding your prioritized behaviors into performance reviews is another, focusing on a subset of the behaviors that are more relevant to a specific team member’s focus within the organization.? Perhaps most important is to not let those that consistently violate the norms of your culture get a pass.? Employees can see that you are taking an expedient path and not holding them accountable.? Taking action to weed the garden and reinforce cultural fit sends a strong signal about your commitment to the culture.? More often, the organization will rise to the occasion and the negative consequences you worry about from getting rid of the employee that doesn’t exemplify your cultural behaviors won’t even happen.

Beyond more formal organizational actions, informal actions like calling each other out when someone doesn’t exemplify behaviors and celebrating those that do will go a long way to strengthening your culture.? Creating an emotional connection to the organization is often better than focusing on rational compliance.? Both are important, but many organizations and leaders put too much focus on the formal when there are often more opportunities day to day to tap into informal means to amplify your cultural behaviors and boost the positive energy within your culture.

Additional insights from my experience focusing on the connection of CX and Culture?

Now that we’ve taken a quick spin through the 8 steps in the wheel around which Culture by Design is organized, lets revisit the three builds I shared earlier that will help you drive even greater impact for how CX and culture go together.

Friedman does an excellent job showcasing the importance of behaviors to translate values into action.? He also puts a healthy focus on rituals and ways to communicate and coach on behaviors within the organization.? All of these will go a long way to raising and sustaining awareness about your prioritized cultural behaviors.? To truly turn them into habits, it’s helpful to also proactively reinforce ways to get employees to make specific commitments for how they will practice the behaviors, and then to engage employees in intentional ways to drive a habit building loop and give them regular feedback on how they are doing.

One phrase that has stuck with me is that it’s easier to act your way into new mindsets than it is to get people to change their behavior by talking to them about why they need to change.? Good motivational speakers or effective stakeholder management as part of change management program are good at getting us to open up and shift our mindsets.? But then the change efforts often get stuck when people don’t have a way to quickly practice specific behaviors.? Using a shift in their mindsets to get them to make a commitment to act needs to be followed by actionable habit building. ?Without that, inertia sets back in.

Rituals are a good way to partially address this natural barrier to change.? Getting all the way there requires intentional focus on habit building that gets you to unconscious competence.? In my experience, once you share content and get employees to make a commitment, then follow up with them in regular interviews via a check-in survey or meeting with a coaching buddy to provide a way for them to reflect on what’s going well versus less well in practicing the new behavior.? You can then also synthesize across these interactions to see where to intervene more closely in your habit building efforts.? Check out my podcast with Chris Taylor here (episode 7) for more on how you can apply habit building systematically as part of your change efforts.

This can also provide a powerful way to connect your cultural movement to your CX efforts.? If you take the time to identify the emotions you want to evoke along the customer journey that make peak moments meaningful and memorable, you can then identify what specific employee behaviors are key to evoking those emotions.? There are then two ways that you can take your culture program to a whole other level that drives more scalable and measurable impact on business outcomes that your CX investments drive.

First, you can link your CX and culture efforts more closely to raise the “clue consciousness” of your employees.? Don’t just train on the behaviors.? Train your employees in how to spot clues for what makes your customer experience truly memorable and emotionally engaging for your customers and each other.? This will provide a common vocabulary and sense of community within your employees to spot and talk about improvement opportunities in ways that link your cultural behaviors to CX improvement opportunities.? For more on this opportunity, see my book reviews for Clued In by Lou (Lewis) Carbone here and my podcast discussion with Lou here (episode 5).

Second, you can update your customer and employee listening programs to incorporate more explicit focus on emotions and behaviors.? I recommend prioritizing the three to four emotions that are most important to create peak moments that matter on the customer journey.? Then you can weave these into your relationship and transactional surveys in complement other questions you have for things like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES).? Once you’ve done some upfront qualitative and quantitative research to prioritize the right emotions, you should use close-ended questions for just a few prioritized emotions in your surveys.? These should be paired with open-ended questions to ask what your company is doing to make customers feel this way along the customer journey.? You can then mine the open-ended questions with AI to prioritize specific behaviors to focus on and share this feedback with your employees.? You can also extend the use of AI to other unstructured data beyond your surveys to build further insights on behavior adoption and improvement opportunities.

Once you’ve started to build regular data on emotions and behaviors, you can use this to track progress in scaling your cultural movement and targeting your efforts.? You can also reinforce the linkage of emotions with business outcomes.? In my experience, this linkage is stronger than from top level survey scores that most companies focus on like NPS, CSAT, and CES.

Earlier in this book review I raised some questions about whether to stay broad in your culture efforts or to dive deeper into specific cornerstone disciplines, such as Quality Management, Agile Product Management, or Human Centered Design, to accelerate your change management efforts and drive more impact around specific business outcomes.? In my own book, The CX and Culture Connection , I call out the value of linking your efforts to one or more of these cornerstone disciplines so that you can ski downhill, tapping into the existing commitments and energy within the organization around that discipline.? The rituals that are specific to these disciplines provide a fertile space for habit stacking.? In many cases this can help revitalize a stalled cultural movement and take it to the next level.

Friedman is correct that taking a holistic lens for culture will have the greatest organizational impact, and that CEO sponsorship is essential to make such a broad-based transformation effort successful.? Many organizations start with a more focused lens than trying to address everything at once.? Starting with more focus initially on customer experience and its linkage to one or more cornerstone disciplines is an excellent way to build momentum.? As you build your list of prioritized behaviors with a CX lens, you can also involve other stakeholders beyond marketing, product, commerce, and service to set yourself up for greater ability to extend your initial work beyond CX later.

In many cases I’ve also found that companies that started out broader lose steam later because they haven’t focused enough on how to drive habit building and a sustainable way to link what they are doing closely enough to business outcomes.? Diving deeper into the CX and culture connection helps to re-energize their efforts and spark more energy that gets their growth flywheel spinning faster again.? You can then use the momentum you are building with CX to broaden the aperture further to how culture impacts your organization more holistically again.

I hope this sparked some great ideas for you!? I look forward to your feedback and continuing the conversation about what resonates most with you from the book and this review!

If you found this insightful, please check out my other book reviews here and be sure to check out my own book and podcast, The CX & Culture Connection here .