It’s a familiar scene in many growing companies:

The leadership team retreats for a couple of days, digs deep, crafts a compelling vision, maybe even a new set of values—and then rolls it out with great fanfare in a company-wide meeting.

There’s a well-designed PowerPoint. Possibly a video. Maybe even branded mugs.

But here’s the question:

How much of it truly sticks?

Not just as slogans on the wall, but as the driver of the company?

Culture Isn’t What You Say. It’s What People Feel.

Culture isn’t installed. It’s not a software update.

It’s an ongoing co-creation of meaning—shaped every day by how people show up, how they make decisions, and what they believe they’re building together.

And that’s the key word: together.

The most enduring cultures aren’t handed down from the top. They’re built from the inside out.

From Rollout to Invitation

A founder I coach had this insight recently. He and his leadership team were circling around a unifying “why”—something beyond revenue targets, something they could all rally behind. And they were excited about sharing it with the team.

But instead of presenting it fully formed, we explored a different path:

What if the team helped shape it?

What if, at the next quarterly meeting, they posed a question instead of presenting a statement?

• “Why are we here?”
• “What kind of experience do we want to create for our customers?”
• “What do we want to feel when we go home at the end of the day?”

These aren’t fluffy prompts. They’re questions that create culture-shaping conversations. And they reveal what already matters to people—what’s already in the DNA of the company that’s waiting to be brought out in to the open.

You Don’t Need a Big Offsite—You Can Just Start

The right culture isn’t created. It emerges.

It’s coaxed from what already is happening when people are at their best.

Here’s what defining a culture can look like in practice:

• A lunch meeting where field staff and office staff share stories of when the company was at its best.
• A whiteboard in the break room with the question: “What’s one thing we’re proud of this quarter?”
• A 15-minute all-hands session where each team shares what they stand for—not what they do, but why they care.

These are simple moves. But they create buy-in because people see themselves in the answers. And they want to be more like the stories they are hearing. They want to be one of the people in the stories.

And when your team helps build the “why,” they don’t need to be reminded of it. They live it—because they made it.

Culture Is a Feeling, Not a File

The best company cultures aren’t designed. They’re discovered.

They live in hallway conversations, the tone of your emails, how you handle pressure, how you celebrate wins—and how you treat each other when you’re not winning.

So if you’re a leader thinking about how to shape culture as you grow:

Try less rollout. More invitation.

The PowerPoint can wait.

Start with a question. And let your people surprise you.

What I am about to share with you might be the most powerful tool I have found in leadership.

Like many of the best coaching tools that I know, I first learned of this one from Steve Chandler.

A large part of the leaders role is to get people to follow, without having to micromanage.

Delegation is an important part of this. But most people who delegate set themselves up for failure.

How?

One Leader’s Attempt to Delegate

One of my clients took particular pride in is willingness to delegate. To hire someone and let them run.

But he wasn’t getting the results that he wanted. And he came to me asking why.

He told me about his most recent hire and all the things that the person was not doing. How he was frustrated, but he didn’t want to tell the person how to do his job.

I asked him if he was familiar with the distinction between expectations and agreements.

Expectations and Agreements, Compared

In almost any area of our lives, when we have a frustration with someone, it is often because they have violated one of our expectations.

The issue is that most of the time, it is an expectation we have never communicated.

Remember that we are all living in separate, internal, worlds?

How would someone else know what we are thinking, unless we have told them?

Just seeing this is a major “aha” for most people.

But there’s more.

Know Your Own Expectations First

My client was hiring people expecting that they would know what to do in their role without much guidance from him. And they did, but they were doing different things than my client expected.

My client didn’t know that he had these expectations—they were not explicit for him—until the new person started doing his or her job differently.

So the first step for my client was observing and documenting these expectations.

Problem solved, right?

Not so fast.

Explicit Expectations are Still Expectations

Even if you get really clear on what you expect from someone, and you document it, you don’t actually have an agreement.

Agreements are based on conversation. Agreements result in buy-in from both parties.

Without buy-in, greater detail on expectations really doesn’t help.

What Are Agreements?

Agreements look something like this—

CEO: “Our investors expect sales to grow 50 percent this year, and I am counting on you and your team to deliver that.”

CRO: “I’d like to talk about that. We don’t have the bandwidth to build the pipeline and have all the meetings that would be necessary to close that kind of business.”

CEO: “Hmm. Tell me more. What would you need from me to be able to commit to that kind of increase?”

CRO: “I have some ideas. One would be another senior sales resource. Another would be…”

CEO: So if I were to give you those resources, you would be willing to commit to a 50 percent increase?”

CRO: “Absolutely.”

Now this is a much longer conversation, but you get the idea.

And sometimes the leader will require her team to stretch, without all the requested resources.

But the key thing is that everyone feels heard. Everyone feels included. And everyone is, to a much greater degree, committed to delivering a result.

This does not happen when the leader simply declares.

When possible, agreements are set in writing, with specific timing and deliverables, and both parties are involved in creating the document.

This is what means to “give ownership.” You AGREE both to the terms and the deliverables. And if you do it right, the person you have given the ownership to is as excited to take it on as you are.

Want to Know More?

Getting clear agreements is one of the things that will make the most dramatic different in your results as a leader.

If you’d like to dive deeper, I will be spending two days with a group of leaders in Denver on October 20-21.

The event is filling up fast. DM me if you are interested in hearing more.

I talked last week about the distinction between behaving like a victim and having like an owner.

I think it was Steve Chandler who showed me this distinction, and it changed a lot for me.

I saw how often my instinct was to blame others, to not take responsibility.

But when I saw that I could take ownership, I noticed some resistance to it after awhile.

Why?

While I understood that being an Owner is much more powerful than being a Victim, I kept thinking that there might be something more.

Something beyond my own personal interests.

I kept wondering about what it would be like to have life happening “Through Me,” to use Michael Beckwith’s framework.

The Nobility of a Just Cause

If you are familiar with Simon Sinek‘s work, you know “Start With Why.”

You know that purpose is a more powerful driver than what you actually do.

And in his later book, “The Infinite Game,” Sinek expands on this idea with what he calls a Just Cause. Something long term, beyond ourselves, that we would be willing to give our entire lives to pursuing.

When I worked for Fidelity Investments, I was in the part of the business that was about tax incentives for employee savings, both through 401(k) plans and health savings accounts.

Our focus was on getting as many working class people to save for their retirements as possible. True, that benefited our business, but that wasn’t what was important to me. It was that in some way, what I did every day made it possible for millions of people to save for and have retirements for themselves and resources to provide for their families.

And I had done the same thing with health care benefits, helping employers provide affordable benefits for millions of employees.

The thing was, no one at any of my employers told me this “why.” It was something that emerged in me.

I was a Steward.

Beyond Owner and Victim

Last week I talked about owner and victim, and the power of taking control of our lives, even as we recognize that we are not ever fully in control of anything.

But that shift is just one of the possible shifts.

As Michael Beckwith wrote, we each operate as if life is happening To Me, By Me, Through Me, or As Me.

Steve Chandler taught me about Victim, and Owner, which I equate to the “To Me” and “By Me” perspectives that Beckwith talks about.

I’ve never seen anyone equate a noun to the “Through Me” perspective, but I’m going to propose Steward.

The Power of Being a Steward

A Steward lives for and from a bigger purpose. A Just Cause, in Simon Sinek’s words.

It can be something that the person creates, or that the person chooses. But the most important thing is that it is beyond an individual. It’s something bigger. And often, it is something that you could work your entire life to achieve.

Martin Luther King was as Steward of a cause much greater than himself. He gave his life for that cause.

Your Just Cause may not feel quite as big, but I assure you it’s just as important.

When you are a Steward, in service of whatever your Just Cause is, you are much more likely to feel fulfillment, purpose, meaning.

And, in my experience, you are much more likely to feel a high level of satisfaction from what you do in the world, even when it is hard.

Part of my Just Cause is helping others identify theirs. Because the world is better off when we are all part of something bigger than ourselves.

What Just Cause have you created, or declared?

And how many people are you leading toward creating it?

Most people recoil at the thought that they might be a victim.

And then go back to fighting for their victimhood.

What Do I Mean by Victim?

If I ask you about something bad that happened—maybe you lost a big game, or you didn’t get the promotion you were expecting—what do you say?

If you instinctively look to your circumstances, or to other people, you are a victim.

If you blame, you are a victim.

You have given up any control that you have over your life.

You are at the mercy of things outside of you.

You have no power.

Does this trigger you?

Most of us, most of the time, take on the role of victim because it is easier than admitting to ourselves that maybe we could have done something differently. That we maybe we could have changed the result. Or that we can change the result in the future.

Two Ways to Live Your Life

The spiritual teacher Michael Beckwith asks, “Is life happening TO you, or BY you?”

In other words, are you a victim? Or do you own your life?

What is the assumption that you start from? The place you come from?

None of us controls everything. Most of us control way less than we think.

Still, it is useful to act as if we do.

To start from the proposition that we are in control.

We see this in champion athletes and coaches. They don’t start with “if the shortstop hadn’t struck out with the bases loaded, we would have won.” Even if that’s true.

Instead, they say something like, “I let the team down today and I have to be better.”

What Does it Mean to Be an Owner?

Ask any founder and you will hear frustration about people not taking ownership.

Of course, when you own the company you own everything that happens within that company.

But a lot of your employees might not. And it can be a lot easier to identify people who are not behaving as owners than people who do.

If you hear ever hear “That’s not my job,” you are not talking to an owner.

Even if it’s not actually that person’s job.

If you hear someone talking about how they could have done more, or how they will do it differently, you might be talking to an owner.

If you hear someone talking about how they will do it differently next time, you might be talking to an owner.

You Can “Take Ownership,” but You Can Also Give It

We’ll talk about a different version of this in a couple weeks, but imagine this—

I can take ownership of what I am responsible for, fully owning the results and my contributions (or lack of them) toward those results.

But as a leader, I can also GIVE ownership.

Not telling someone what to do, but offering them the opportunity to own it for the sake of their own development.

And when you master this, your leadership, and your leaders, will change.