Culture Activation

Cascade Culture Through TRM

You've learned how to use TRM to activate performance goals. You delegate a responsibility with a clear expected outcome, set constraints and key results, and someone takes ownership. That structure works.

But TRM isn't limited to activating only performance goals. You can use the same mechanism to activate cultural goals—widespread acceptance of how the organization thinks, what it values, how it approaches trade-offs.

The structure works identically. You establish a cultural goal (for example - “we act with strategic ownership"). You define it and establish constraints that further modify how it will actually show up. And leaders at each level interpret it for their context, making it more specific and actionable for their situation.

Here’s a glimpse at the next level: the activation mechanism for culture is the same as for performance

The type of goal you're activating is different. That's all.

Adding Cultural Goals to Your Activation Environment

Until now, you've probably thought of TRM primarily as a performance tool. You use it to deliver outcomes, hit metrics, execute strategy.

Now, as an Executive, you're adding something to that environment. You're using the same structure to additionally activate a shared understanding of how the organization thinks. It’s this thinking that enables people to make good decisions in situations you and they might never anticipate. That's the role of culture.

This is what allows you to scale from 1:1 influence to organizational influence. 

With TRM, when you set cultural expectations, you're not just hoping it cascades. You're using TRM’s activation to ensure it.

How Cultural Goals Work in TRM

When you define a cultural goal, you're obviously not defining a performance outcome. You're defining a value or principle that should guide how work gets done.

For example, "strategic ownership" isn't a metric you hit. It's a way of thinking you want embedded in the organization. It means people own their responsibilities. They understand how their work connects to the mission. They exercise autonomy within constraints. They escalate when something isn't working because that's what ownership demands. 

So you introduce this cultural goal into the Responsibility Matrix the same way you embed performance goals.

Your cultural goal starts with more than a declaration that you care about 'strategic ownership'. You start by explaining it to your direct reports, broadly and fully. In face-to-face meetings, they grow to understand how you feel and why it matters. You might supplement your explanation with some constraints about where ‘strategic ownership’ requires escalation to you — personally. 

Your subordinates take this cultural goal and interpret it for their function. What does 'strategic ownership' look like in a sales organization versus an engineering organization? Each of your subordinates cascades this expectation to their next level as a formal responsibility, all while making it relevant to their context.

They do this when they meet with their direct reports. They explain what this means and why it matters. And these direct reports do the same with the people below them. By the time it reaches the individual contributor, strategic ownership has been reinterpreted a number of times. But each reinterpretation is rooted in your original thinking. And TRM provides a documented mission chain that propagates this expecation from the top to the bottom of the organization. Responsibilities to show 'strategic ownership' are clear.

You're instituting change in the only way that works - through alignment and accountability. Those are the hallmarks of TRM.

What's Different About Activating Cultural Goals

Here's the critical difference between activating a performance goal and a cultural goal.

When you activate a performance goal, it's easy to define specific key results. "Increase retention by 15%." "Launch the product by Q2." These metrics are unambiguous about whether you achieved the outcome.

When you activate a cultural goal, you typically can’t define specific key results to measure the cultural goal itself. You simply can't easily measure whether people understand 'strategic ownership' or whether they're thinking the right way about problems. It shows up through accumulated outcomes, not direct observations.

It’s more realistic to simply let the cultural goal cascade through the organization the same way performance goals do. Leaders interpret it, embed it in their responsibilities, and make it relevant to their context. 

Just don’t expect a dashboard full of detailed metrics to tell you if it’s working or not. 

Not right away.

Give it time. 

Trust the process. 

Governing Performance vs Governing Culture

TRM, at its core, designed its structures so that two values will inevitably emerge: engagement and trust. 

If we’re successful, we’ll know it through the dashboard of key results. And we’ll know it in two ways.

First, there’s a general meta analysis of the dashboard as a whole.

The idea is simple. When people are operating with engagement and trust, key result metrics are generally ‘in the green’ across the organization. It’s not because everyone’s setting easy goals. Goals, after all, are defined top-down. People aren’t setting their own goals. Or their own metrics. 

What they are doing is successfully executing. They’re fulfilling their responsibilities using the structures that TRM describes. And it’s reasonable to suppose that a broadly green dashboard of key results is what it looks like when engagement and trust are actually present. Is this the only potential feedback about whether we’ve been effective at instilling engagement and trust? No. But it’s a reasonable proxy and it’s readily available. 

And, second, we can devise metrics that serve as a proxy for our cultural goal. For engagement and trust, we might track internal promotion rates versus external hires. We might track engagement survey scores and employee turnover. We might track patterns in performance reviews. None of these are perfect, perhaps. But they can provide insights about engagement and trust.

Activating and Monitoring Other Cultural Values

TRM, by default, activates engagement and trust. But those aren’t the only values that a leader might wish for their organization. What about ‘honesty’, ‘inclusion’, ‘curiosity’, ‘playfulness’, or a hundred other potential cultural traits? 

How would we use TRM to embed these traits? How would we monitor them? 

And that’s the topic of the next post.