Operationalizing Culture: Key Plays to Start Using Today

Azlin community, I’m excited to be back with guest post #2 on the intersection of culture and outperformance. This post focuses on brass-tacks Xs & Os from the culture playbook that you can deploy in your companies today.

In post #1, we focused on quantifying how positive culture leads to long-term outperformance and introduced the three pillars of the culture playbook:

1. Supporting individual motivation

2. Creating shared purpose and belonging within teams and organizations

3. Building a flywheel to do both consistently

When I discuss the importance of culture with people, many nod in agreement, then pause and ask, “Wait, how do you actually do it?” Culture often feels like a fuzzy, ephemeral, and overwhelming concept (how do I change the behavior of a 5-person team or a 10,000-employee company?!).

The good news is that culture is operational. The best culture companies have a playbook that is tangible and repeatable. It’s consistently deployed—just like agile sprints, quarterly QBRs, or manufacturing line best practices. How you transform organizations and people’s lives happens in the mundane. The power is in the details.

Let’s double-click into the three pillars with one specific play for each.

Pillar #1: Supporting Individual Motivation

Key Play → Create a Culture of Recognition and Support

Few have heard of Barry-Wehmiller (BW), a private conglomerate based in St. Louis, Missouri. BW stepped into the public light through CEO Bob Chapman’s memoir, Everybody Matters, which details the company’s journey from a near-bankrupt manufacturing business to a thriving $3 billion global portfolio of 120 businesses—including a private equity and consulting arm—united by a simple but profound principle: success comes from truly caring for people. BW has, quite literally, written the book on how a strong, people-centered culture can drive business outperformance.

Recognition is the most important play in BW’s very thick playbook. It’s built into every level of the company’s operations. The lightweight version happens in weekly standups, where team members recognize something a colleague did and how it impacted them. At the company level, peer-nominated award winners are selected from written submissions based on actions that reflect company values. Winners are celebrated company-wide and receive a sports car to drive for a week, along with a handwritten note to loved ones from Bob or the specific business CEO.

The system is both championed from the top and brought to life from the ground up. Every employee is empowered to shape how recognition happens—whether they’re a front-line worker, team leader, or executive. The process is intentionally decentralized, placing initiative in the hands of those closest to the work. Notably, most awards are based on private peer nominations—not popularity contests—which reinforces authenticity over visibility.

At seed-stage startup Ethic in 2017, we instituted a weekly “Recognition Friday” meeting when we were just a handful of employees. The play was basic: on Friday mornings, the entire team came together to first share recognition, then discuss upcoming priorities. That’s it. As a 100-person, Series D-stage startup today, the Friday meeting remains foundational to Ethic’s culture eight years later.

This play is about treating people like human beings and building community—both essential in a world where we spend as much time at work as we do at home with family and friends.

Pillar #2: Creating Shared Purpose and Belonging Within Teams and Organizations

Key Play → Purpose and Values Drafting

Purpose, vision, values—these words have become so mainstream and generic that they’ve lost their meaning. While a mission and values can be motivating, they’re just as likely to feel like empty statements plastered on office walls. It’s behavior plus values that equals culture.

The best way to activate purpose and values is to give your team the pen. Here’s a template I’ve used with clients, drawing from Jim Collins’ work and my experiences across best-in-class culture companies like LinkedIn and Atlassian. In terms of how to use it, I’d offer two suggestions:

1. At the company level, let your people weigh in. If you’re drafting for the first time, don’t do it in a vacuum. Make the broader team part of the process. Open the document to public comments (Google Docs makes this easy). Host live Q&A and feedback discussions during company all-hands or in smaller groups. And if you already have a shared purpose and values, revisit them annually. Here’s a look at how LinkedIn did this from CEO Ryan Roslansky.

2. Encourage teams to create their own purpose and values. Community is local. Give teams autonomy. Recently, at Docusign, we began creating finance organization principles to guide our leadership journey. It’s a powerful exercise that brings teams together. Bob Chapman speaks to this in Everybody Matters—local team and company visioning is also a core play in the BW playbook.

Pillar #3: Building a Flywheel to Do Both Consistently

Key Play → Wide-Spectrum Standups

In Drive, Daniel Pink explains that intrinsic motivation stems from three pillars: autonomy, mastery, and purpose—with autonomy serving as the foundation. In organizations, autonomy often comes down to whether individuals and teams are trusted to take action on their own decisions.

In Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal describes the challenge of transforming 170,000 armed service members in Iraq from a traditional bureaucracy into a high-performance, distributed organization. His most important tool? A daily virtual standup across 7,000 leaders. These meetings aligned leadership on priorities, created a real-time forum for discussion, and empowered teams to act autonomously based on shared understanding.

This isn’t a complex play. Standups are foundational to Agile and Scrum. Barry-Wehmiller uses them as a core building block across the 100+ companies it has acquired. What’s unique in the Team of Teams example is the scale and the commitment to transparency—cutting through bureaucratic silos. Ford did something similar after the Great Recession, assembling its extended leadership weekly to align on priorities and share progress. The innovation here is going wide-spectrum.

Stepping Back

I’ll leave you with a final quote—from poet David Whyte in Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity:

“Have a firm persuasion in our work—to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time…. Factory or farm, individuals need a sense of belonging in their work, a conversation with something larger than themselves, a felt participation, and a touch of spiritual fulfillment.”

It’s up to us, as leaders and stewards of businesses, to treat people well—to choose to do so every day—and to recognize that organizations perform best when their people feel supported and motivated by positivity. It may not be how we were trained, but it can be how we lead, how we want to be led, and how we build the strongest version of our companies.

About Azlin Software

Azlin Software acquires and supercharges modern, niche software companies. We hold for the long term—supporting your team, product, and mission without ever planning to sell.

When partnering with business owners, we look for:

• Shared values and a foundation of trust

• Vertical software in a protected niche

• Modern, cloud-native tech stack

• $2-5 million in ARR with clear product-market-fit

• Profitable or close to breakeven

• Highly recurring revenue and loyal customers

If you or someone in your network is thinking about selling or investing in their B2B software business, we’d welcome the chance to connect and learn more.

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