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- 🖤 Open Works #030 Culture Means Different Things to My CEO & I... How Do We Get On The Same Page?
🖤 Open Works #030 Culture Means Different Things to My CEO & I... How Do We Get On The Same Page?
Every edition we solve a people and culture problem, crowd-sourced from the Open Org community.
John Faulkner-Willcocks
March 21, 2025
Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 470+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.
📚️ Recent Editions
If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.
🎯 Edition 26: How to co-create values so they don’t just end up as “words on a wall” – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.
🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.
🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.
💭 This Week’s People Problem
"Culture Means Different Things to My CEO & I... How Do We Get On The Same Page?"
People Leader gently reminding the rest of C-suite that culture doesn’t mean vibes.
🖤 Our Take On How You Solve
🏃 TL;DR:
Culture isn’t vibes—it’s HOW people work.
Align around culture as a multiplier for execution, not a “feel-good” initiative.
Diagnose where culture accelerates or blocks business performance.
Build a culture roadmap that leadership actually cares about.
⚡️ The Problem
You say “culture,” but the CEO hears “team building” (or worse…vibes). 🤦 I hear you, friend. And look, I have nothing against team building. But if you’re bringing it up in the same conversation where other execs are talking about growth, efficiency, and profitability, you’re in for a rough ride.
So,
how do you get them on the same page?
how do you get leadership to take culture seriously?
🚀 1. Start with a clear, no-BS definition
We adapted a golden oldie from Deal and Kennedy:
💡 Culture = how we work, here.
👉️ Action: get CEO/leadership together and address the fact that when you say culture you mean this:
Open Org’s CultureOS
If you do this, you reframe the conversation. Culture becomes a multiplier for execution.
It stops being “fluffy” and starts looking like operational excellence.
✅ Good operational excellence = faster decisions, better retention, higher performance
❌ Bad operational excellence = misalignment, wasted time, high attrition
Start illustrating the cost of bad culture with specifics:
“We lost 18 top candidates because our hiring process is 30% slower than peers.”
“Delays on Product Launch X cost us £450K.”
“We waste £256,999 a year on meetings that should be async.”
And when you’re still hitting resistance? This one never fails 👇
If we employ 450 people at an average salary of $70K, that’s a $31.5M annual investment.
So if we’re spending $31.5M on people every year, why wouldn’t we focus on getting the best possible return on that investment?
How people work together determines whether that $31.5M translates into high performance or wasted potential. Ignore it, and inefficiency, misalignment, and disengagement will quietly drain millions from our payroll.
If this were any other investment, we’d be laser focused on safeguarding ROI. So why treat our biggest investment—our people—any differently?
💡Pro Tip: for some CXO's the word culture will cause an allergic reaction and there's nothing you can do about it. If so, try just using the phrase "operational excellence" instead. This has worked for me. CMD + F (replace "Culture") - not kidding. 😂 🔍 2. Diagnose Where Culture Helps or Hurts Execution
Instead of debating “what culture is,” measure how your ways of working impact business performance.
Use "How We..." statements to make culture tangible:
🚦 Culture Health Check – Score these areas:
How we make and communicate decisions
How we onboard and develop talent
How we handle failure and feedback
How we reinforce good/bad behavior
How we align on priorities
How we…
Sort them into:
✅ What’s working? (Protect these)
⚠️ What’s causing friction? (Fix these)
🔥 What’s actively blocking execution? (Change or bin these)
💰️ What cost saving/productivity multiplier can we attribute? (Priorities)
👉️ Action: Run a quick leadership diagnostic to align on priorities or run an org-wide hackathon to leverage everyone’s insights. Both included here:
🛠 3. Build a Culture Roadmap Your CEO Cares About
Once you’ve identified opportunities to improve how work actually gets done, build a culture roadmap that directly supports business goals. Focus on operational excellence shifts that remove friction, increase speed, and drive alignment.
✅ Short-term (1-3 months):
Fix decision-making → Clarify ownership, speed up execution, and reduce decision bottlenecks.
Streamline onboarding → Reduce ramp-up time so new hires contribute faster.
✅ Mid-term (3-6 months):
Scale leadership behaviours → Define what “great leadership” looks like in your culture and coach for it.
Tighten feedback loops → Ensure teams get real-time input so they can iterate and sustain high performance.
✅ Long-term (6-12 months):
Reinforce accountability & incentives → Align recognition and rewards with how you expect people to work.
Break down silos → Improve cross-functional collaboration to reduce friction and increase team velocity.
📣 4. Manage Culture Like It’s Your Other Product.
Measure success: Track each change you make to a “how we…” component of your culture like an experiment.
Make it visible: Share progress org wide and report it at leadership level. Transparency drives accountability.
💡 Pro tip: Show leadership that changing nothing is the real risk.
Take your priority “how we…” statements and show on this chart.
📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…
🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?
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🖤 John & Adam
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John & Adam
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