What the Culture Index revealed about our team—and why I’m grateful for hard conversations
Every time I think our team has learned everything we can possibly learn about each other, I’m proven wrong.
In the years we’ve worked together—some of us more than a decade—we’ve taken dozens of assessments to help us learn more about ourselves and improve our team dynamic. We’ve taken DISC, StrengthsFinder, MCODE, the Appreciation Languages, the Four Tendencies, the Enneagram—I could go on and on.
We first started taking these assessments around 2015, when our leadership team was much larger and we were still working on building trust. While the results were very revealing, the most valuable part was the conversations they would inspire. Any time we took a new assessment, we’d look at our results and point out what we thought was interesting, what resonated and what didn’t, and ask for others’ perspectives. Those conversations always led to important shifts and improvements in how we worked together.
Because we’ve taken so many assessments and worked so hard on our team dynamic, I thought those days were over.
Wrong!
A couple months ago, Monique, our Chief of Growth, was having dinner with a dear friend who also happens to be the COO of a company. Her friend, Soly, told Monique that her company uses an assessment called the Culture Index to help them leverage their team’s strengths and create a culture that brings out the best in everyone.
Monique—a lover of assessments and anything related to growth (hence her title!)—was intrigued, so she pulled up the assessment on her phone and took it right there at dinner. Then she texted me and asked me to take it so that Soly could help her look at Monique’s and my dynamic. Monique is my right hand in the business and my thought partner, and we are both passionate about making our working relationship the best it can be.
I took it and sent my results to Monique right away. The assessment itself is very simple: It consists of choosing words that you think describe yourself at work and outside of work. Then, the program uses your answers to create two graphs: One represents your “natural” behavior (how you are in your natural state) and the other represents how you behave at work. The comparison can reveal how much you are “stretching” when you’re at work and where you might be over- or underusing your energy. Stretching can lead to burnout while underusing your energy can mean you’re not fully leaning into your strengths.
Both Monique’s and my results showed that we work within our natural strengths, which is great, but that we’re also underutilized in the business. That is something I wanted to dive into. But before we did that, I thought it would be helpful to ask the rest of the team to take the Culture Index, too. We asked Soly if she could lead us through a discussion about our individual and collective results at our quarterly in-person meeting, which was just a couple of weeks away. We decided to do it over dinner at our team’s favorite sushi spot.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I saw this as an opportunity to have a fun, interesting conversation and do a little team-building. I certainly didn’t think that it would lead to us having a three-and-a-half-hour conversation and essentially shutting down the restaurant.
It was absolutely unbelievable how well the assessment shed light on the pieces of our team dynamic that haven’t fully clicked into place yet. I’d describe it like this: 90% of what we do as a team works really well, and 10% could use some work. Soly did a wonderful job: Having her external, objective viewpoint to set the stage and pose meaningful questions led to a productive and, at times, difficult conversation. We unpacked the tensions and pain points we each feel and went deep into why they exist.
We could have kept going that night, but we decided to put a pin in the conversation and pick it back up the next day on our own. I think this was an important part of why the conversation ultimately ended up being really successful for us: We took time that evening to get to the heart of the issues, and then we gave ourselves time to process before talking about solutions. That is big growth for me. Usually, I want to resolve everything right away, but that doesn’t always lead to the most intentional resolution.
The next day, I thought it would be helpful to switch things up as we continued our chat. We went for a three-hour walk together on a beautiful sunny day and stopped for lunch halfway. By the end, we all felt like we had really gotten somewhere.
So often, I find myself sharing really positive anecdotes about our team that make it look like things are always rainbows and butterflies over here. Things really are positive most of the time, but we have our moments of tension—and this conversation was definitely one of them. It’s important to us that you don’t just get the idealized version of our team, so I want to give you an honest look at what we talked about on our walk that day:
Natural vs. Stretched: We learned from the results that out of anyone, I am the least-stretched person on the team. My graphs were nearly identical, which means I behave the same at work as I do outside of it. Monique, our Chief of Growth, has a similar graph style, so she isn’t overstretched, either. On the other hand, Rachel, our Chief of Content, is the most-stretched person on the team. She found this surprising because she works in her sweet spot—writing and editing—and doesn’t feel the stretch because of this. However, the more we talked about Rachel’s role, the more we realized that there were things on her plate that aren’t in her natural strengths and that didn’t need to be there. We decided to delegate all of the deadlines and creating structure and systems around content to Monique because that’s where her natural strengths lie. Finally, Cheyenne, our Chief of Operations, is also stretched in her role. However, after some healthy debate, she says she prefers the challenge because she is in a season where she is passionate about growing and learning different aspects of the business. To keep her from stretching too much, we identified some of the responsibilities she doesn’t love and passed those to Monique, who was excited to step in and help.
Pace: One of the things that the assessment revealed is my tendency to work at a lightning-bolt pace, which is no surprise to me. I like things to happen, like, yesterday, and I’ve really had to learn to balance my intensity as a leader. I have always felt insecure about this aspect of my personality; it’s hard for me to tell when my sense of urgency is helpful and when it might be too much. We talked about this a lot as a team and especially what it means for Cheyenne’s and my working dynamic because we collaborate on many things daily. Cheyenne gave me feedback that really helped me: She told me that she appreciates my pace and that it motivates her. The team helped me see that my pace, when harnessed intentionally, is responsible for a lot of the results in our business. I left our conversation feeling more secure and confident to lean fully into this strength of mine.
Structure: The assessment also revealed my resistance to structure and regulations. That’s right: I’m a rebel when it comes to creating order. In fact, we learned I’m energized by chaos. On top of that, I tend to rely on traditional methods (I’m a pen-and-paper gal) and I’m reluctant to change things that I think work just fine. It’s not that I intentionally stand in the way of change or efficiency; it’s just that it never occurs to me that there might be a better way. As you can probably imagine, my reluctance slows down and frustrates the team—and especially Monique. From this conversation, we found that we had some unresolved pain points when it comes to our roles and how they connect. For a while now, I’ve been expecting Monique to take ownership of certain systems and processes, and I’ve been frustrated that she hasn’t yet. Monique helped me see that it wasn’t for a lack of effort on her part; she felt she couldn’t fully take ownership because I was getting in the way. She couldn’t trust that I would follow whatever new systems she created because I always switch things up—and she’s definitely not wrong. Through this conversation, we figured out how Monique could step into this part of her role and what she needed from me to do that.
Ownership: Ownership, in general, was a big theme of our conversation. I want each person to feel empowered in their role and to own their superpowers, but in order to do that, we all need to clearly understand who owns what and what that ownership means. I realized that there were things I wasn’t owning that I really wanted to—brainstorming new ideas for content, for example—while others recognized that they owned things they didn’t want to own anymore. What I always find so cool about these conversations is that when one person realizes they don’t want to own something, there’s always someone on the team who does. It was freeing to have a conversation where we could talk openly about where we each wanted to live more in our strengths and what needed to shift in order to make that happen.
At the end of our walk, we acknowledged that it had been awhile since we’d had a “tough” conversation like that. We also acknowledged that it expanded the already high trust we all felt with each other—not the opposite. Any time we talk about difficult things as a team, we always end with more trust than we started with. Now, about a month later, we’ve put what we talked about into action, and we’re so grateful we created the space to work on our team instead of in it.
This helpful and productive conversation only happened because we were all willing to lean into a difficult conversation and be vulnerable with each other. But we couldn’t have started it on our own. The Culture Index assessment and Soly’s facilitation helped because they were outside sources of information about ourselves and each other. The assessment created an entry point for us to discuss things that we had discussed before in new ways and see them through a new lens. Even the setting of the conversation helped: Instead of facing each other from across a conference table (or over Zoom), which can implicitly feel confrontational, the physical act of walking alongside each other sent the message that we’re on the same side and we are a team.
More than anything, what I’m taking from this experience is that the learning and work is never done. No matter how long you’ve worked with people or how much trust and candor you have, there will always be things that you can work on and learn about each other. You can’t get complacent with your growth.
If you’re looking to have conversations like this with your team, I encourage you to switch things up: Bring in a facilitator (sign me up!), take a new assessment, and do something that will cause you to get outside of the day-to-day. Even when you’ve worked together for so long, done so many assessments, and learned and grown so much together, it’s amazing to see how many more layers you can uncover!
I hope this encourages you to keep learning and growing with your team.
Big hugs,
