Be Intentional

Culture exists whether you are intentional about it or not, so invest time in defining the culture you want and creating it. Culture is seen most in the actions of leaders across the organization.

Everyone Owns Culture

Everyone needs to feel like they are responsible to own and shape the culture.The practice of continuous reflection, celebration, and learning is key to shaping the culture as the organization changes and grows.

Culture Begins with Core Values

Core Values are essential. They allow you to name and reflect on the mindsets behaviors you want to be shared in the organization.

Inclusiveness is Key

Creating an inclusive culture, where everyone feels welcome to be who they are, drives both staff engagement and results. Enabling everyone to feel welcome will likely require naming and disrupting common ways of operating and engaging in regular conversations about self awareness and bridging difference. This is particularly important as you increase diversity on your staff so that people are aware of unconscious biases and able to work across lines of difference.

Keep the Student at the Center

The mission is a distinguishing factor of the organization. For the culture to feel connected to the mission, it can be helpful to consider how to keep the student at the center of all decision-making. Some partners have also invited children to events, built habits around keeping an empty chair representing students at all meetings, or always asking “how does this decision impact students?”

Build a Learning Culture

Research suggests that the most successful organizations are learning organizations -- where staff members feel psychologically safe; where there is healthy disagreement; where failure and experimentation are accepted and encouraged. Leadership behaviors, systems, and culture all contribute to psychological safety and innovation.

Balance and Self-Care Matter

Because staff care about the mission, sometimes they forget to care for themselves. This can lead to burnout and does not drive strong results in the long-term. The healthiest organizations have staff who are able to find a balance between their personal and professional goals, motivations, and needs.

Engage with the Vision and Values and Meaningfully Connect with Each Other.  

While making choices about how to spend team retreats, remember that they are a unique opportunity to deepen understanding of the organization’s core purpose and values. Consider spending time in communities or classrooms to understand the perspectives of students, parents, teachers, alumni, and others.

Invest in Building Trust 

Spend time allowing staff to share their life stories and building vulnerability and trust. This will help people to collaborate more effectively when they are not together in person.

Disruptive Experiences Can Be Powerful.

They create shared learning opportunities and spaces for reflection. A disruptive experience can be as simple as an hour spent in discussion with community, or something more complex, like an overnight home stay in a high-need placement community. Always plan ample time to reflect on the experience and create shared meaning.

Co-create the Content with Your Team

Retreats can be a powerful opportunity for all staff to exercise leadership and for many voices to be heard. Consider having the team co-create the agenda for the retreat and co-facilitate so that the full burden does not fall to the leader of the team.

Employee Engagement Is Not the Same as Employee Satisfaction

Engaged staff members feel a personal connection with their organization, care about its future, and are motivated to give their best. Engagement is driven by a range of factors including clarity of vision and goals; manager capabilities; performance management; collaboration; and accountability.

Regularly Measure and Discuss Employee Engagement

The organizations with the strongest staff engagement scores in the network regularly reflect on staff engagement data and take action based on what they learn. The conversations, actions, and reflections are even more important than the survey. Consider evaluating the data for your diversity, inclusiveness and representation goals, and include these elements as key parts of your continued conversations and action plans

Involve All Staff in Efforts to Improve Engagement 

The most effective way to improve employee engagement is to collaborate with all staff to strengthen the organization, rather than having the responsibility fall only to senior leaders in the organization. Consider working groups or other forums where staff from all roles, teams, and levels can design and implement organizational improvement efforts.

Diagnose Your Current Culture

The first step to changing your culture is building a shared view of what your culture currently is. Different people will have different perspectives on what the culture is, so doing a shared diagnosis to build a more complete picture can be helpful.

Name the Change You Want to See

When trying to change the culture, clearly describe the change that you want to see (from this, to that). Consider whether that change is incremental or radical, and make sure your actions align appropriately to the level of change needed. Some programs find it helpful to name how they want it to feel when the change is complete. Others explicitly name what they want to Start, Stop, and Continue.

Identify “Quick Wins” and Celebrate

When making change, it is important to have quick, early successes. Identify where you might have an easy early improvement, and celebrate that improvement. Also, change often happens through “champions”  -- people who hold a lot of influence in the organization and believe in and can model the change. As part of your strategy, identify and work closely with champions.

Model the Change You Want to See

People will copy the behaviors of leaders. So make sure that the leaders in the organization are changing their actions and are talking about the changes they are making and why they are making them.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

When leading change efforts, it is important to name many times the change you want to see, why it is important, and the progress that is being made. Having clear priorities and actions can be helpful in communicating the plan and the progress. Celebrating successes is a key component of this strategy, as it builds a sense of momentum and progress while people are feeling challenged by the change. And, most importantly, make sure there are regular spaces for shared reflection on the change where each staff member can think about their role in the change and how it is going as well as overall progress.

Sustained Change Takes Time

Remember that change is a journey that takes time. People need to shift their beliefs and their actions. They often need to gain new knowledge or build new skills. And often, people feel attached to old behaviors which have given them success in the past but won’t continue to drive success. Don’t be discouraged if things don’t change immediately, or if they change but then regress. It will take time to form new habits.

You May Lose Some People Along the Way

When big change efforts are successful, coming to work can feel different. For most people, this change will feel great. However there may have staff members who no longer motivated by the new culture, and who opt to leave. This is normal, healthy, and enables you to hire people who are motivated by your culture, and who contribute to nurturing the culture.