The Surprising Power of Documenting Expectations in a Culture Deck
One of the top concerns for boards of directors today is leadership, succession, and culture. Why? Because in this economy, talent drives results. No matter how brilliant a strategy is, it takes people to execute it—and without clear expectations and alignment, even the best strategies can fall short.
Yet, many CEOs, CFOs, and even CHROs lack firm answers when asked about their organization’s culture. Pointing to HR programs and initiatives isn’t enough. Culture isn’t just about programs; it’s about how people work together every day.
If we asked 50 people in your organization what a good leader is, we’d probably get 50 different answers. That’s because, in most organizations, the teams responsible for defining manager competencies or expectations often differ from those who define the organization’s values, operating principles, leadership standards, or even vision and mission.
This disconnect can lead to redundancy, conflicts, or gaps in understanding and performance. By standardizing and harmonizing these elements into a single, collectively exhaustive set of guidelines, parameters, and best practices, organizations can achieve alignment and clarity. A way to raise the prominence of this work is to mimic what signifies strategic work, such as a strategy deck, a board deck, and a pitch deck. This best practice—a culture deck—is a solution hiding in plain sight.
A culture deck defines what’s expected and how we work together. It’s a comprehensive and harmonized framework that aligns an organization’s vision, mission, values, leadership principles, manager competencies, and more.
The deck consolidates everything that defines the organization’s culture into one cohesive document. This isn’t a jumble of disconnected statements—it’s a unified playbook for how people interact, make decisions, and achieve results.
It also drafts off of industry standards and best practices, lowering the cost of understanding for new hires, board members, or other external stakeholders. By clearly defining various elements, such as a vision vs. mission statement, leadership tenants vs. manager comptencies, or values vs. operating principles, it clarifies for everyone why they exist and how they can be leveraged.
A well-crafted culture deck serves as a source of truth. It clarifies the rules of work, defines what “good” looks like, and provides a shared foundation for feedback, recognition, hiring, onboarding, development, and more. It’s actionable, accessible, and designed to be used—not just read.
A culture deck isn’t just a nice-to-have. It addresses real challenges that organizations face every day:
The culture deck is also a powerful tool for building trust and engagement. Employees feel more confident when they understand exactly what’s expected of them and how they can contribute to the organization’s success.
While creating a culture deck might seem like a massive undertaking, much of the insight you need already exists within your organization. Here’s how to do it:
The first step is building consensus around the need for a designed culture. Leadership must understand the value of documenting and standardizing expectations.
Focus on alignment over agreement—it’s nearly impossible to get everyone to agree on every detail. Instead, aim to bring stakeholders onto the same page about the overall direction, with the executive team serving as the ultimate decision-makers.
You don’t need to start from scratch. Organizations often have a wealth of insights from:
Use these resources to identify patterns, gaps, and areas of strength. Supplement them with targeted surveys or focus groups as needed.
Work with leadership to refine key components like vision, values, and leadership principles. Use data and hypotheses to shape the deck, prioritizing clarity and simplicity.
Standards around each element of the culture deck, such as inclusivity, clarity, density, applicability, unique language, etc., along with a defined structure that forces pithy definitions, ensure that all elements “come together” and are “part of a system.”
Engage stakeholders throughout the process to build buy-in and gather feedback. Test and refine the framework to ensure it resonates across levels and functions.
Showing stakeholders drafts and getting input along the way, including a tier or two below the C-suite, brings them along and makes them co-signers of the defined culture.
Create a polished, visually distinct artifact that people proudly use and share. The culture deck should feel like a centerpiece of the organization and not just another slide deck.
Our customers dedicate a half-day virtual offsite to walk through the deck, clarify understanding, voice any final concerns, and start to define examples of when the culture comes to life and levers to embed it into each of their portfolios.
Bring the culture deck to life through workshops, training, and discussions. Make it a living tool tied to real-world processes like hiring, feedback, and performance management.
For this work to stick, and ideally sustain even with CEO succession, it requires 3-5 years of consistent investment, oversight, experimentation, and variety to have this fully take root in the daily reality for you and your colleagues. You may not want to address that at the start of this work. Still, as the culture gets fleshed out further and stakeholders start to articulate how this will help drive performance, that may be the opening to set long-term expectations around continuous investment and a “never done” rollout.
Success with a culture deck means creating one source of truth for your organization’s expectations, behaviors, and decision-making processes. It gives employees and managers the clarity they need to do their jobs more effectively, whether hiring, giving feedback, resolving conflicts, or planning succession. And it brings to the forefront what makes top talent and star performers so special, adding fuel to celebrations, recognition programs, and internal communications.
Defining culture has an impact outside of your organization as well. Recently, the CEO of one of our customers met with state regulators who asked about her plan to manage culture and talent. This was a critical question because some competitors had faced issues with regulators tied to engagement and retention. This CEO was able to clearly articulate her strategy and speak to the implemented culture deck, which impressed the regulators. They commended her proactive stance and wished more companies were as deliberate.
Another customer, after a significant merger, faced a similar question from a private equity board chair: “What’s your culture strategy?” While the business fundamentals were strong, the chair wanted clarity on how they’d differentiate in the talent market and attract scarce technical talent. The culture deck provided that answer in an easily understood way, offering a roadmap for building an environment to attract, retain, and engage top talent.
Even in recruiting, a culture deck is invaluable. Every organization claims a great culture on its careers page, but few define it clearly. A culture deck bridges that gap, showing candidates exactly what it’s like to work there. It excites talent by offering clarity, transparency, and confidence that the organization knows what it stands for.
Designing your culture isn’t just an HR initiative—it’s an organizational one. And while HR can play a critical role in architecting the process, it’s often helpful to bring in a partner.
Why? Because when you’re inside the jar, it’s hard to read the label. An external perspective can help align diverse opinions, drive urgency, and ensure strategic vision.
A partner also ensures the culture strategy gets the full attention of the CEO and C-suite. Instead of being the last item on a crowded agenda, this work becomes a priority through standalone, highly facilitated sessions that are engaging, focused, and a great use of time. HR avoids having to burn reputational capital or escalate the need for this work while executives see what’s in it for them.
