Strategies for Reinforcing Team Values in Leadership

When I joined Khan Academy, we were just four people in a small office, united by a vision of bringing free education to everyone, everywhere. Over the years, we grew to hundreds of employees, reaching over 100 million students worldwide. This exponential growth brought a significant challenge: how do you scale a team without losing the culture and values that made the organization special? The most crucial lesson I learned was that culture doesn't scale automatically - it demands constant attention and effort. The best way I found to attend to culture was to treat your culture like a product. You have to design it. As we grew, it became increasingly important to consider how to help team members learn about and carry the culture forward. Here are three strategies that helped us maintain our culture during rapid growth: 1. Over-communicate the Mission and the Principles that Guide it: As our team grew, we doubled down on ensuring everyone felt connected to our mission and understood our principles. Three of the most important principles were to focus on the student, Always be learning, and deliver exceptional ROI for donors. We regularly shared stories of how our work impacted students' lives, and what we learned from failures and successes, and calculated the number of learning minutes to keep the team aligned with our "why" and “how” and motivated by our shared purpose. 2. Create Rituals that Reinforce Values: We have meaningful rituals, such as starting meetings with student success stories and celebrating what teams learned, not just what they accomplished when we gave status updates. We also organized a yearly talent show and encouraged people to showcase new talents and skills. These practices served as constant reminders of our principles in action. 3. Adapt, but Stay True to Core Values: Growth necessitated changes in processes, tools, and communication methods. For example, we used to be able to share what we were learning during all-hands meetings, but at some point, it became impossible for each team to give an update. As part of our commitment to learning, we began to document our learnings and shared long-form asynchronous updates with everyone. We then shared summaries during all-hands meetings. Scaling a team while preserving its culture is challenging, and we weren’t always successful, either. But we were lucky that the team let us know when they thought we weren’t living up to the mission or principles and encouraged us to make changes.  It is achievable if you remain open to feedback and stay focused on core principles. What strategies have you employed to maintain culture as your team or organization grew?

Your culture is the invisible force that shapes how people feel about your brand. And it starts with your leadership — → The way you hire and train → How you embed values into your work → The processes you deploy → The way you demonstrate who you are …these subtle cues convey so much about your brand. Because in a world of copycat products and services… …culture is your secret weapon. It's the DNA that can make your company so special. Here's how to harness it: ↓ 1️⃣ Live out your values Don't just write your company principles on a mission statement and forget about them. Embody them. And actively reward team members who embody them. At Motto, we recognize when someone demonstrates our values through kudos, performance, bonuses, and other recognitions. Whether it's showing radical candor or going the extra mile, we celebrate it. 2️⃣ Rally around a Big Idea Every company worth remembering has a Big Idea that clearly and concisely defines their reasons for existing. Express this in big ways — how your company operates as a whole — and in small ways. For example, the way you end team meetings. We sign off with "Do big things" to remind everyone they're here to do exceptional work. 3️⃣ Embed your values in hiring Your job postings and career page should reflect your culture’s transparency and values. We, for instance, outline each step of our hiring process upfront. This helps us proactively recruit candidates who align with our values and can handle our high-performance environment (while screening out those who can’t). 4️⃣ Proactively invest in growth Each of your employees is an asset. Give team members chances to learn and teach others what they’ve learned. On Friday, we give one hour for our team to take classes and share their knowledge with the team. It builds their skills *and* confidence in leadership. 5️⃣ Use failure as fuel When you hit a wall, always see it as a chance to innovate and bounce back even greater. Embed this into your company DNA more than anything else. Your culture isn't just internal. It shows up in every interaction with customers, partners, and the public. So, nurture it carefully. The culture you nurture today is the brand you have tomorrow.

Early in my leadership journey, I confused clarity with buy-in. I thought if I could just articulate the mission perfectly the team would feel it. Own it. Run with it. So I’d tell the story with all my enthusiasm, build the deck, show how it that aligned with our values and goals. I’d polish one-pagers and kick off meetings with vision talk. And for a while, it felt like it worked. But underneath the nods and smiles, nothing really changed. One team member put it to me gently: "I love the direction, but I’m not sure how to live this out in the day-to-day." That’s when it clicked: -You don’t build culture by announcement. -You build it by cultivation. Culture isn’t a memo. It’s a harvest. And harvests don’t begin with words. They begin with seeds. 🌱 What I Missed (and What I Learned) *When you cast vision without inviting ownership, you grow compliance. I was trying to download a belief system like software. But people don’t change that way. They shift through conversation, reflection, experience, and practice. Here’s the agricultural metaphor that changed how I lead: Culture is a crop. Healthy crops need: -Seeds (ideas you plant slowly) -Soil (relational trust and emotional safety) -Water (stories, reinforcement, and feedback) -Sunlight (visibility, air time, modeling) -Time (yes, more time than your strategy doc allows) Don’t force growth. Cultivate it. Don’t roll out values once a year. Water them weekly, in 1:1s, team meetings, Slack messages, and spontaneous stories. Don’t set culture on Monday and walk away. Show up Thursday with a trowel and ask, “What’s sprouting? What still needs care?” 🚜 What It Looks Like in Practice Want to build a more courageous, creative, or accountable team culture? Try this instead of a vision dump: 📌 Seed: Share your half-formed idea early. Invite a few trusted voices into the conversation. Ask: “How would this land with your team?” or “What would make this real for you?” 📌 Soil: Double down on trust. Don’t expect new behaviors in an environment that punishes mistakes. Culture only takes root where people feel safe enough to risk. 📌 Water: Celebrate tiny examples. Tell stories when someone lives the value out loud—even if it’s imperfect. These stories are the nutrients that feed new growth. 📌 Sunlight: Make the vision visible. Not as a slogan, but as a practice. Model it. Point to it. Align your decisions with it, even when it’s costly. 📌 Time: Resist the urge to declare something “didn’t work” just because it didn’t show fruit in a quarter. The best culture change happens underground first. *Root systems form long before the blossoms.* Consider this: -If you want a team to carry something, you need to let them co-create it. -Ownership begins at the root—not the launch party. -Don’t push. Cultivate. -Don’t announce. Plant. -Don’t expect fruit without first tending the soil. It’s slower. But it’s stronger. And the harvest? Worth every season it takes.

Success leaves clues. So does business failure. The difference between thriving companies and failing ones? Implementing transformation in the wrong sequence. Leaders who struggle with a dysfunctional workplace often miss a fundamental truth: cultural transformation can follow a specific, predictable process. The 4 D's of Cultural Change are a game-changer: 1. DEMONSTRATE Culture change begins with what you DO, not what you SAY. Your team watches every move you make, especially during stress and conflict. I've coached founders with toxic cultures who transformed their companies by starting with their own behavior. One founder began openly acknowledging when he was wrong - within weeks, his team followed suit. No mandate needed. Your actions broadcast priorities louder than words. Want psychological safety? Publicly thank someone for challenging your idea. 2. DEFINE Only after consistently demonstrating behaviors should you name the behavior as a desired cultural value. You're not inventing culture – you're articulating what's already emerging. Founders I've coached only formalize values after weeks of modeling those behaviors. By then, the team understands what the words mean through experience. Words create powerful shortcuts once behaviors are established. 3. DEMAND This is where most leaders mistakenly start – with demands before demonstration. And this is why so many leaders get frustrated trying to change culture. I've seen countless founders demand "intellectual honesty" before modeling it themselves. They get compliance but not commitment. After months of sharing their own errors, demanding the same behavior actually sticks. Your demands gain moral authority when they match your behavior. 4. DELEGATE The final step is building systems that maintain culture without your constant presence. Culture becomes truly embedded when it runs without you. The most successful founders I coach implement: • "Learning from Failure" sessions in team meetings • Peer recognition systems tied to values • Performance evaluations based on cultural alignment, not just results The most powerful cultural systems allow team members to hold each other accountable. Most leaders want culture change without personal change. They follow frameworks without doing the inner work. Through coaching dozens of founders, I've observed this consistently: The leaders who create lasting culture embody the transformation first. This requires uncomfortable self-awareness: Seeing your own patterns clearly. Understanding how your behavior creates ripple effects. Being willing to change first. At Inside-Out Leadership, we help founders combine leadership development with deep inner work. The result? Leaders who transform their cultures sustainably by transforming themselves first. When you demonstrate change, define it clearly, set expectations, and build systems... You don't just change culture. You transform your company from the inside out.