In brief
- Your culture already has a personality: how decisions get made, what the company protects when things get tight, and what people get recognized for.
- Naming it takes three steps: listen, name the personality, and translate it into behaviors for every level.
- Those behaviors go into the tools your people already use, starting where your culture is leaking the most.
Every company has a culture, whether or not anyone has ever named it. Candidates feel it in the first interview. New hires feel it in their first week. Everyone feels it the first time something goes wrong and they watch how the company responds.
Most companies try to describe their culture with a list of values. Integrity. Teamwork. Excellence. Those words aren’t wrong, but they rarely explain why your best people stay, why some new hires leave in ninety days, or why one employee wins customers over while another in the same job doesn’t.
To explain that, you need a different starting point.
Your culture has a personality
Values describe what a company believes. A personality describes how it behaves: how decisions get made, what the company protects when things get tight, what people get recognized for, and what it refuses to give up. Every organization has patterns like these. Repeated long enough, they become its personality.
A real culture shows up in three places at once:
- How leaders decide. The reasons behind the calls, especially the hard ones.
- What employees experience. Day to day, from the first interview to the exit interview.
- What the company makes or sells. Your product carries your culture to every customer who uses it.
When all three line up, people trust what they see. When they don’t, there’s a gap between who the company says it is and how it acts. That gap is where good people start to leave.
Why it matters for your talent
People feel a culture long before anyone names it. The right people recognize themselves in it and are drawn in. The wrong fit feels it too, usually a few months after they’ve been hired.
The best-known consumer brands understand this with their customers. They know their personality, and every touchpoint expresses it, so the right customers feel a connection before they can explain why. You don’t need to be a household name to do the same thing with talent. You need to know your own personality and make sure people meet it everywhere.
That connection is what attracts the right candidates, keeps people engaged once they’re inside, and keeps them from leaving when the work gets hard. While the culture stays unnamed, the connection depends on which employees happen to sense it. Once it’s named, it stops depending on luck, and everyone can connect to it on purpose.
How I name it
Naming a culture isn’t a brainstorm of words on a whiteboard. With the Culture Code™ Readiness System, it happens in three steps.
- I listen. I talk with your leaders and your employees, and I look at what your people are already telling you through engagement surveys, exit interviews and turnover. I also look at your product and how you present yourself to the world. Those conversations carry more weight than any single assessment.
- I name the personality. I identify its attributes: what it values, how it shows up at its best, and how those same strengths turn into problems when nobody is managing them.
- I translate it into behaviors. The personality becomes specific behaviors, and what each one looks like at every level of your organization, from frontline employees to the executive team.
How I put it to work
Your culture reaches people through six parts of your HR system: recruiting, onboarding, training and development, performance reviews, promotion and succession, and employee relations. Together, they decide who you attract, how engaged people stay, and who you keep.
I don’t tear those processes down and rebuild them. I put the behaviors into the tools your people already use: job descriptions, interview guides, onboarding plans, review forms, and the conversations managers have every day.
I start where your culture is leaking the most. For some companies that’s hiring the wrong fit. For others it’s new hires leaving in the first ninety days, training that doesn’t stick, or promotions that backfire. Then I roll it out, starting with leadership. If leaders don’t live it, nobody else will believe it.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a values workshop that ends with a poster. It isn’t a personality test for your employees, either. Nobody gets labeled. The personality belongs to the company, and the behaviors describe what the company expects of everyone in a given role.
And it isn’t a replacement for your HR team. Your HR people keep doing the work. They gain the language to describe what that work should look and sound like at your company, and a standard everyone can see.
Read next: What Working With Me Looks Like
Start here
Start with a conversation
If you’re ready to connect your culture to the talent you’re trying to attract, engage and keep, schedule a discovery call. I’ll talk through what you’re seeing in your company and walk you through how the process works. Not ready for a conversation yet? The Culture Quiz gives you a first read on your culture’s personality.
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