18 Top Resources for Building a Strong Company Culture

I keep pointing people to “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle. It forced me to really look at what psychological safety feels like in practice, not as a concept you toss into a deck. One example he shares—how strong teams constantly signal belonging—stuck with me. It pushed me to rethink how I open meetings. Instead of jumping straight into metrics, I start with small wins or a simple “what caught you off guard last week?” It sounds minor, but it changes the tone in the room.

I tried this during a project where two departments had basically stopped trusting each other. We pressed pause on process fixes and spent a couple of weeks building a habit of quick, specific recognition. The shift was noticeable; people stopped guarding their turf and actually started offering ideas again. That book made me see culture less as a mood and more as the system underneath everything.

One book I recommend a lot is The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. The big thing it drove home for me is that culture lives in how leadership behaves day to day, not in values posters or offsites. He breaks it down into a few hard questions: Who are we, where are we going, how do we behave here, and how do we make decisions. When a leadership team answers those in plain language and repeats them until they are sick of hearing themselves, the rest of the company finally starts to believe there is a real operating system underneath the slogans.

The other takeaway that stuck with me is how much damage fake harmony does. Avoiding conflict to keep things “positive” just pushes the fight underground and people stop trusting each other. After reading it, I got a lot more direct in leadership meetings and a lot more consistent about explaining the why behind decisions, and that alone cleaned up a lot of culture noise.

One book I often recommend to leaders who want to improve their company culture is “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. It’s not a textbook on culture, but it goes deep into the human side of how teams work or fall apart, and it’s written in a story format so you can actually see the problems in real situations, not just lists of theory.

The key takeaway for me was how lack of trust at the foundation affects every other part of a team—from conflict avoidance to unclear commitments, to people not holding each other accountable. Early in my leadership journey, I focused on strategy and goals but ignored how comfortable people felt being honest with each other. Once I started encouraging real conversations, healthy conflict on ideas, and accountability without judgement, our culture shifted in a way that made execution smoother and morale stronger. It taught me that culture isn’t a perk or policy, it’s the patterns of behavior you reinforce every day.

The only book I would hand to any named leader that walked through my door is Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself. You’d think it’s a football book, but it’s really a manual on rules and discipline. The one thing I took away from that book is that culture is not made up of big things, it’s the little things. How early are you? How do you provide feedback? How frequently do you do the boring parts? Walsh didn’t wait for motivation; he developed systems around behaviors that outlast feelings. That’s the part that stuck with me. Raise the floor and the ceiling rises by itself.

In other words, trying to make people happy will never fix your culture. You fix it by eliminating the drama. Low drama, high standards, and predictability. That’s what commands attention. I apply that mentality when I hire, when I train, and how I run everything from the front desk to the surgical prep. No one wants to be led by fluff. People want to be able to trust and understand, especially in a career where precision matters.

One book that really influenced how I think about culture is High Output Management by Andy Grove. What resonated with me most is that culture isn’t something you declare, it’s something that emerges from how work is designed.

The big takeaway for me was that systems shape behavior. How meetings are run, how decisions are made, how ownership is defined, how performance is measured, those things matter far more than values written on a wall. If the system rewards clarity, accountability, and focus, the culture will reflect that.

That thinking pushed me to stop asking ‘How do we build a better culture?’ and start asking ‘How do we design work so people can do their best work without unnecessary friction?’ Once you get that right, trust, learning, and motivation follow naturally.

For leaders, my advice would be: don’t try to fix culture directly, fix how work flows. Culture is the output.

I’m a huge fan, and unaffiliated with, “Traction: Get a Grip On Your Business”. It teaches small businesses how to implement the Entrepreneurs’ Operating System (EOS), which is all about clarity and accountability.

Many think of accountability in terms of the stick and not the carrot. EOS, however, takes the carrot over the stick approach. Accountability in EOS terms mean that the employee always knows specifically what is expected of them, and so when they achieve those goals, they and their managers know that the work is being done well.

We implemented EOS at College Recruiter job search site a decade ago, first just between the owners (my wife and me), then the rest of our small Leadership Team, then company-wide. The results have been superb, although not without bumps. We’ve found that some managers and employees despise accountability. They prefer to agree that “we” should do X, instead of assigning that task to a specific person with measurable outcomes and expected dates of completion. They want to think that all employees will somehow magically always do their work well. They’re wrong. If an employee doesn’t know what is expected of them, how can they know how to do that work well, or even at all?

One resource I often recommend is “No Rules Rules” by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. What made this book valuable for me wasn’t just the stories from Netflix — it was how candidly it explained the culture mechanics behind high performance, especially around freedom, responsibility, and feedback.

The key takeaway I gained is that culture isn’t built by slogans or perks — it’s built by the decisions you protect and the behaviors you reward. Netflix’s emphasis on clarity over consensus, honesty over comfort, and accountability over hierarchy challenged how I think about team norms. It pushed me to prioritize transparency and ownership in ways that strengthened alignment without adding process. The result was a culture that could move faster and with more trust, even as the organization grew.

A book that strongly shaped my view on company culture is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. It speaks honestly about leadership during difficult phases when values are tested and real choices must be made. The biggest lesson is that culture is built during uncomfortable decisions rather than during easy wins. Moments of pressure reveal what a company truly stands for over time.

One idea that stayed with me was being direct while still staying human in every conversation. Avoiding tough discussions may feel kind at first but it slowly weakens trust and clarity. I applied this lesson during a restructuring phase where open expectations mattered more than comfort. Once everything was discussed clearly teams aligned faster and confidence across the group improved.

One resource I always keep coming back to is David Goggins’ podcast appearances. While they aren’t about company culture specifically, his words completely changed how I viewed standards and accountability.

The best takeaway I had was this: culture isn’t something you create by giving out perks or by creating countless policies and mission statements. It’s something you create by what employees are willing to endure without being watched. Goggins always talks about doing the hard and unglamorous work, even when no one is applauding. It serves as a reminder that we don’t look like our goals – we look like our habits. As someone responsible for operations, HR, and performance, this resonates deeply with me.

What I took into the business was how we tackled responsibility, focusing less on motivation and more on follow-through. Shifting from “How do we make people comfortable?” to “Are we clear about our standards and what excellence actually entails?”

It also reminded me that as a leader, I get to set the ceiling. This means that if I cut corners or justify delays in processing or delivery, that would become the company culture. Listening to Goggins helped me be more confident in making the hard decisions and in being more consistent with the standards I wanted to set.

We recommend Dare to Lead for leaders who avoid hard conversations. It taught us to name discomfort and stay present during conflict. We learned that avoidance creates stories that damage trust. We now choose clarity before comfort.

We use a shared script that focuses on observations and needs. That keeps feedback grounded and lowers defensiveness in the room. Leaders can practice this with role play in manager training. We track conflict resolution time as a health signal.

One book I recommend to any leader who wants to improve company culture is People: Dare to Build an Intentional Culture (The EOS Mastery Series) because it breaks down culture into something you can actually design and manage—not just hope happens naturally.

The biggest takeaway I gained is that strong culture isn’t built through slogans or perks, but through clear core values, consistent hiring and firing standards, and leadership behaviors that match what you say you believe.

It also reinforced for me how important it is to get the right people in the right seats, create honest accountability, and make culture part of the operating system of the company instead of treating it like a “soft” topic—and I genuinely feel that mastering the People component of your business is the most foundational and transformative thing you can do, because once you get the right team aligned and accountable, everything else in the company becomes easier to improve and scale.

For leaders asking what resource can genuinely help improve company culture, one book I consistently recommend is Leaders Eat Last because it reframes leadership as a responsibility, not a title. The key takeaway I gained is that strong cultures are built when leaders create psychological safety, where people feel protected, valued, and heard. Early in my medical career, I watched one hospital unit thrive while another struggled, and the difference wasn’t resources—it was whether leadership showed up for their teams during stressful moments. That lesson mirrors Sinek’s core idea: when leaders put people first, trust and performance follow naturally.

In my own practice and media teams, I’ve applied this by prioritizing transparent communication and small, consistent acts of support—especially during high-pressure situations. One simple but powerful insight from the book is that culture is shaped by daily behaviors, not mission statements on a wall. Leaders who listen more than they speak and who step in when their team is overwhelmed build loyalty that can’t be forced. My advice is to audit how safe your team feels raising concerns and admitting mistakes, because that’s where real culture improvement begins.

Something I’ve found helpful is ‘No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention’ by Reed Hastings. There’s no coddling in this book; Hastings is practical and practical in his approach to culture not as a list of perks, but as the operating system of high performance, a lens through which to look at how to remake your assumptions of how to run a modern company.

My biggest take away was the realization one of this now-classic book’s directives illustrates – you can only have a culture of freedom and responsibility if you do two things first. You have to create high talent density and you have to build a system of candor. First, hold yourselves ruthlessly to hiring and retaining ‘stunning colleagues’ so your baseline culture is excellence. Then, establish an environment in which ‘you’re being disloyal to your company if you aren’t speaking up,’ in Erin Meyer’s words. Only then can you start dropping controls like vacation policies and travel approvals, creating a company filled with ownership states and prepared to make decisions quickly.

One resource that’s quietly shaped our company culture is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

I was skeptical at first. The title sounds manipulative, and a book from the 1930s doesn’t exactly scream modern leadership. But once I actually read it, I realized it’s less about influence tactics and more about strategic restraint.

The key takeaway that changed how we operate: you can’t win an argument without losing something more valuable. Even when you’re objectively right, pushing to prove it usually damages the relationship. In a service business, that cost shows up fast.

In practice, this plays out when clients have unrealistic expectations. Instead of arguing or defending our position, we ask questions that help them reach better conclusions themselves. It keeps things collaborative rather than turning into a standoff where someone has to lose.

Another principle we’ve internalized is treating people like individuals, not account numbers. We avoid automated responses, don’t shuffle clients between unfamiliar team members, and make sure whoever answers the phone knows the full history without frantically checking notes first. It sounds simple, but it fundamentally changes how people experience working with us.

That philosophy also influenced our decision to stay deliberately small instead of scaling aggressively. Carnegie emphasizes depth of relationship over volume, and we’ve built our entire model around that. We could probably grow faster, but our retention stays high, margins are healthier, and honestly the work feels more sustainable.

The book isn’t trendy, and some examples definitely feel dated. But the core lesson still holds: culture isn’t built through ping-pong tables or mission statements—it’s built through how you handle disagreement, pressure, and people when things inevitably don’t go perfectly. Everything else is just window dressing.

I keep coming back to Patrick Lencioni’s “The Advantage.” It isn’t a typical leadership book full of tactics or communication hacks. It’s really about how organizational health sits underneath everything else — execution, alignment, and, ultimately, culture.

The idea that stayed with me is that clarity matters more than charisma. We’ve seen that play out at Octopus. Once our leadership team got serious about defining and reinforcing what we actually value — not the polished phrases you stick on a wall — we made sharper calls about hiring, how we ran reviews, and even which client relationships we stepped away from.

Another piece that proved useful is Lencioni’s distinction between being smart (strategy, finance, technical depth) and being healthy (trust, low politics, consistent messaging). Plenty of firms have brilliant people, but very few put real effort into becoming healthy organizations. We learned the hard way that a team that isn’t aligned can quietly undermine client confidence, no matter how strong the proposal looks.

His approach to overcommunicating clarity and embedding values into hiring and operations became part of how we scaled across jurisdictions without losing our footing. Culture isn’t something you build at an offsite; it shows up in who gets recognized and how decisions are actually made. That’s the part we keep the closest eye on now.

I’m Jeanette Brown, a relationship and leadership coach and founder of JeanetteBrown.net. I work with founders and senior leaders on trust, conflict repair, and culture under pressure.

A resource I recommend for leaders who want to improve company culture is Ruda Iande’s book ‘Laughing in the Face of Chaos’.

I don’t know Ruda personally, but we work in the same “inner work meets real-world leadership” niche and his writing influenced how I coach culture as a lived experience, instead of as a slogan.

As he writes in the book, culture is built by the stories people tell themselves under stress, and leaders either reinforce those stories or interrupt them. The book pushes you to spot where you’re performing “certainty” while the room is actually scared, and to lead from truth instead of image.

In practice, that looks like making repair normal (naming impact, taking responsibility, changing behavior) and creating a workplace where people don’t waste energy on defensiveness. When leaders do that consistently, the culture gets calmer, braver and more accountable fast.

One resource that genuinely reshaped how I think about company culture is Traction by Gino Wickman. It made something click for me: culture breaks down less because of bad intent and more because of ambiguity. When priorities, ownership, and feedback loops are clear, teams spend less energy second-guessing and more energy doing good work. The biggest takeaway is that accountability isn’t about control. It’s about removing confusion so people can trust each other and focus.

WorkLife with Adam Grant

For leaders working to improve the company culture, I highly recommend that they watch the podcast by WorkLife with Adam Grant. He is an institutional psychologist who uses his studies to explore how the work environment can be converted into a more meaningful and stress-free workspace. I learned from this episode that future leaders need to accept the possibility of not having all the answers. A culture of “toxic positivity” can be avoided, and true trust can be developed by normalizing the feeling of “I am struggling” at all levels.