State Policy Network
Why your organization needs a culture statement—and how to write one

By Aly Rau, Michael Reitz, and Justin Owen

There is plenty of talk about “organizational culture” these days, especially as the protracted pandemic has upended nearly everyone’s traditional working environment. What is an organizational culture anyway? Organizational culture “is the collection of values, expectations, and practices that guide and inform the actions of all team members.” In a nutshell, your culture is your organization’s North Star.

Over the past few years, our three organizations have gone a step beyond creating and fostering a strong culture to actually committing it to writing. If your culture is so important that it defines who you are, there’s no better way to express it and nurture it than to write it down on paper.

How to create a written culture statement

While the Mackinac Center, Pelican Institute, and Beacon Center are different organizations of varying size and budgets, the process we all went through to draft a written culture statement was virtually identical. We first made the case to our team about the benefits of a written culture statement. We then assembled the entire team—every single person on staff—to be part of the process. During that discussion, team members offered their perspectives about what it means to work at our institutions, what makes them proud to be part of the team, how they interact with and treat each other, and how they carry themselves and expect others to represent the organization to external audiences. At the end of the discussion, we had dozens of words and phrases describing who we are.

From there, a smaller team assembled those statements into groups based on similarities and common sentiments, streamlining the language without losing the meaning behind it. Finally, we brought the written statement back to the full team for further discussion and refining. The result was a document that captured our core values in full, but one in which every word mattered to everyone on the team. The final product is, admittedly, both descriptive and aspirational. It describes who we are as well as who we want to be when operating at our best.

Pitfalls to avoid when creating a written culture statement

This process may give some leaders heartburn, but if your organizational culture is strong, you will be surprised to find how much agreement there is among team members, even in large organizations. And if you worry about opening a Pandora’s box, perhaps it’s past time to have that conversation.

It is important to avoid boxing yourselves in by starting with a presumption that you should have a set number of values or that it should fit on a single page. The number of individual statements we arrived at ranges from five (Beacon) to seven (Pelican) to 11 (Mackinac). Several values are reflected in all three of our documents; others are unique to our organization.

Another pitfall to avoid is trying to assert leadership’s perspective onto the team. If you draft a culture statement without team involvement, they aren’t likely to buy into it. After all, culture is not something that can be forced on people. In a way, it is a living, breathing organism.

It’s written down, now what?

Once you have a written culture statement that your entire team supports, the most important part begins. You can, of course, file it away and never look at it again, but that defeats the purpose. A meaningful culture statement is one that is put into practice and used daily. Here are some ways our organizations use ours:

The future of work will undoubtedly look very different than it did pre-pandemic. A written culture statement is more important than ever to ensure that your entire team is aligned and rowing in the same direction day in and day out no matter what that work environment looks like.

Aly Rau is the chief of staff for the Pelican Institute in Louisiana. Michael Reitz is the executive vice president at the Mackinac Center in Michigan. Justin Owen is president & CEO of the Beacon Center in Tennessee.

Categories: Strategy