You're the person everyone comes to when team dynamics get tense, and you're exhausted from holding your practice culture alone. The conflicts you're mediating, the expectations you're clarifying, and the team dynamics you're managing take up space in your leadership capacity that could be directed elsewhere.

Your assessment reveals you're in the foundation building stage, which means you're managing culture without the explicit agreements that would let your team share this responsibility. You haven't yet identified and defined the specific work culture norms that guide how your team members approach their work and how everyone (including you) navigates the working relationships across the practice.

The Distinction Most Practice Owners Miss

Work culture norms are different from your outward-facing organizational values. While your website might list values like "compassionate" or "trauma-informed" to communicate your therapeutic approach to clients, work culture norms guide how your team members show up both in their relationships with each other and in their approach to their work. This includes things like how you handle conflict, make decisions together, support each other during challenges, and uphold standards around clinical competency, cultural humility, or professional growth.

These internal norms may align with your public values, but they need to be specifically defined for your team's working relationships and work approach. Many practices have beautiful mission statements but lack explicit agreements about what happens when team members disagree, how feedback gets shared, what cultural humility looks like in practice, or how to maintain therapeutic competency as a team.

This is about moving beyond platitudes to embodied practice. It's about creating the working agreements and relational systems that actually shape your workplace culture day to day. When values aren't consistently practiced and embodied through your relational systems, they create mistrust rather than connection.

Why Values Often Feel Hollow

You've probably seen workplaces where values are posted on walls but not backed up by actual behaviors and relational systems. This is why "company values" often feel performative. The difference lies in moving from abstract concepts to concrete co-created working agreements regarding how your team shows up together.

What Your Current Experience Likely Looks Like

Right now, you're probably managing culture through various approaches: 

• Addressing conflicts as they arise without clear frameworks

• Hoping new hires will naturally "get" your practice's unspoken norms

• Finding yourself as the go-to person when team dynamics get tense

• Wondering why some team members seem naturally collaborative while others remain distant

You might catch yourself thinking, "They should already know this" or "This feels so basic to explain." These thoughts often surface when you're managing culture alone, without explicit agreements your team can reference or uphold together. You're naturally stepping into multiple culture related roles because no one else has been invited to share this responsibility.

The overwhelm you're experiencing makes complete sense. Leadership training rarely includes how to cultivate collaborative team dynamics. Most practice owners find themselves in this exact position.

These patterns don't stay static. The informal culture emerging now becomes the entrenched culture you'll need to actively shift later.

What Work Culture Norms Actually Look Like in Practice

Here are examples of how website values translate into actionable work culture norms:

Instead of "We value respect"

Transparent Communication

When practiced, we speak with clarity, kindness, and honesty. We address concerns directly with the person involved rather than discussing with others first, knowing that open dialogue strengthens trust and prevents misunderstandings.

Instead of "We believe in teamwork"

Collaborative Support

When practiced, we take responsibility for our individual roles while actively offering and seeking support. We recognize that our collective capacity exceeds what any of us can accomplish alone, and we celebrate both individual contributions and team achievements.

Notice how each norm includes specific examples (what would a video camera capture?) and explains the underlying intention. This gives team members concrete guidance for navigating real workplace situations.

The Three Phases of Work Culture Norm Mapping

What Foundation Building Looks Like

Moving from informal culture management to systematic culture development means creating explicit agreements that let your team share culture responsibility with you. This phase involves identifying and defining work culture norms that guide how your team shows up in their work and in their relationships across the practice.

We work with your existing relational ecosystem, uncovering what's already working beneath the surface and giving language to the collaborative dynamics you want to cultivate.

The 90-Minute Work Culture Intensive

For practice owners in the foundation building stage who want focused, personalized support, we offer a 90-minute session where we work together to:

• Identify your practice's unique relational strengths and challenges

• Co-create work culture norms specific to your team dynamics

• Draft behavioral definitions that feel authentic to your practice

• Plan your team introduction strategy that builds genuine buy-in

• Create an implementation timeline that honors your team's capacity

You'll leave with a working draft of your culture norms, clear next steps, and the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what you're building.

Interested in exploring whether this is right for your practice?

Schedule a complimentary consultation where we'll help you understand what's actually happening in your practice dynamics and identify where you're spending the most energy, discuss whether the intensive or other support makes sense for your situation, and answer your questions about investment and what's included.