Harvard Business Review Press / Big Think
Key Takeaways
- Start taking stock of company culture by reviewing your mission, values, and purpose statements.
- You may find that you’ve strayed too far from your original purpose and need to find a way back.
- Rituals are the day-to-day traditions that reinforce your culture: Simple activities repeated over and over have a cumulative effect on culture.
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Excerpted from Culture Design: How to Build a High-Performing, Resilient Organization with Purpose. Copyright 2025 James D. White and Krista White. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press.A great way to start taking stock of your culture is to review your written artifacts, including your mission, values, and purpose statements. You’ll also want to gain a clear understanding of the roots and history behind these statements. How did you get to where you are now? Do you feel like your mission statement and written values align to how your people show up every day? Leaders with a clear understanding of these fundamental documents and histories can use them as guideposts as they build culture; or they can work to change them to better represent the culture they want to intentionally design.
Brenna Davis, CEO of the nation’s largest organic produce wholesaler, Organically Grown Company (OGC), emphasizes the importance of honoring the company’s roots. She has a reverence for the founders and retired alumni of the company, who at OGC are referred to as “elders.” Davis told us about how the company has upheld its founders’ mission by establishing the first perpetual purpose trust in the country. Founded in 1978 by a group of farmers, OGC has long centered its work on its mission: to promote and inspire the growth of the organic agriculture movement. In 2018, it took that history into account when it restructured to transfer ownership to the Sustainable Food and Agriculture Perpetual Purpose Trust. This allows OGC to focus on its long-term purpose instead of short-term shareholder returns. With this act, purpose and culture became inextricably linked and inextricably tied to how the business runs. Now, the organization’s relationship to its purpose affects how work gets done, how meetings are run, and how decisions get made. It is by understanding its history that OGC was able to carve out a path for its long-term future.
For you, revisiting your company’s mission, purpose, values, and history may spark some initial ideas about where there may be gaps between your purported culture and how it shows up. When you compare your mission statement or documented values to organizational policies and tactics, do they match? You may find that you’ve strayed too far from your original purpose and that you need to find a way back.
History can also reveal how far you’ve come. For legacy companies, there will often be lessons of what not to do and clues as to how to reconcile past wrongs with your vision for the future. Whether it is ties to systems of oppression or dishonest business practices, history is not to be forgotten or swept under the rug, but to be learned from. Follow those hunches to the next part of your dig and document them as you design questions for surveys, interviews, or roundtables that you may conduct later. Keep your personal notes handy in a spreadsheet, Google Doc, or a good old-fashioned legal pad. The most important thing is keeping track of the work you’re doing here in a way that will be most accessible to you and your team when it’s time to go out and talk and listen to your stakeholders.
Next, explore rituals. From the way you start and end meetings to how you celebrate employee contributions to your annual company retreat, rituals are the day-to-day traditions that reinforce your culture. At meetings, people have used everything from a routine check-in to see how their team members are feeling to a moment of gratitude shared at the onset of meetings.
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At The Honest Company, CEO Carla Vernón aims to create psychological safety and creativity, so at town halls she asks employees to share which of a preselected set of Pixar characters represents what mood or energy they’re embodying in the moment. (The options include the characters of Joy or Fear from Inside Out, or the relaxed optimism of Crush the Turtle in Finding Nemo.) And to foster a culture of open communication, Lee Wallace, CEO of fair trade coffee producer Peace Coffee, has instituted an agenda item in every meeting that asks what needs to be communicated and to whom as a result of the meeting. Keeping everyone on the same page with the information they need to succeed is a key part of her change management agenda as she grows the company. Simple activities repeated over and over have a cumulative effect on culture.
Consider what it would mean to create a ritual that was uniquely suited to your company and colleagues.
Many of you may be thinking, That kind of stuff is not for me — you don’t see a connection between results and asking people how they feel at every meeting. We know it works and encourage you to be vulnerable and get out of your comfort zone and try it. But also recognize that not all rituals are about feelings. Other types of rituals that reinforce culture are brief weekly check-ins about the successes and challenges of the week, a daily review of a tenet of centering customer needs at staff meetings, or a biweekly cross-functional review and prioritization of issues that have come up during those two weeks.
Celebratory rituals often take the form of a company picnic or holiday party, but consider what it would mean to create a ritual that was uniquely suited to your company and colleagues. OGC has long celebrated its annual tomato war, where team members go out at the end of tomato season and throw overripe tomatoes at each other. When we heard about this, we immediately wanted an invite to the event, and it struck us that most companies don’t have celebrations with quite so much personality and distinction. The fact that OGC does signals to us that that culture is being intentionally designed. Do you have any traditions that are uniquely suited to your culture? Do you have any ideas for new traditions you could institute? This is the intentionality piece of building culture through rituals. None of the examples we give you here will be appropriate to you, but they should show you how specific and apt to the culture your rituals can be.
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