Surface what your team is actually feeling at work. Agree the emotions you want to grow. Build the accountability rituals that make them stick. Measured before and after with the Emotional Culture Pulse.
Most leadership teams pay close attention to one half of their culture: the cognitive half. Values painted on the wall. Strategy on the off-site slide deck. Behaviours described in the competency framework.
The other half — Emotional Culture — runs underneath all of that and gets vastly less attention. It's the set of emotions people are actually feeling at work, and it shapes how they show up, what they say in meetings, how they handle conflict, and whether they go the extra inch.
You can write your values on the wall and still have an Emotional Culture of low-level anxiety. You can have brilliant strategy and a team that quietly feels unseen. The two cultures move independently. Emotional Culture is harder to see and easier to ignore. It's also where most of the unrealised potential in a leadership team lives.
The distinction comes from Sigal Barsade's research at Wharton. Both cultures are always there. Most teams develop one deliberately and the other accidentally.
The values, mission, goals, language. Usually deliberately designed. Often written down. Visible to outsiders.
The emotions people actually experience at work. Usually unspoken. Rarely deliberately designed. Strongly predictive of engagement, retention, and discretionary effort.
Default shape, tailored after a discovery call. Most engagements run as a half-day kickoff plus two follow-ups over the next two months, with the Pulse measurement bracketing the work.
Short anonymous survey to every team member. Around five minutes per person. Measures the emotions people are currently feeling at work and the emotions they wish they were feeling. Gives a starting line that's not anecdotal.
Half-day session with the team. We share the Pulse results, name the current Emotional Culture out loud (the part that's serving the team and the part that isn't), and agree the three to five emotions you want to grow and the two to three you want less of. Output is a one-page Emotional Culture map.
Half-day session two to three weeks later. Translates the agreed emotions into specific operating practices: how meetings open, what gets celebrated, how disagreement is handled, what gets named when it happens. These rituals are what make Emotional Culture stick instead of decay.
Two-hour session at month two or three. What's working, what isn't, what got dropped, what needs tightening. The team owns the rituals now. James is mainly checking that the practice is alive and helping debug what isn't.
Same survey re-run at month six. Compared against baseline. Tells you whether the work moved anything in language the team controls. Becomes the starting line for the next round if you want one.
Emotional Culture is the set of emotions a team agrees they want to feel, and to avoid, at work. It sits underneath strategy and behaviour. Most teams have a strong Cognitive Culture (the values and goals on the wall) and a weak or unspoken Emotional Culture. The research distinguishing the two comes from Sigal Barsade at Wharton.
James uses the Emotional Culture Pulse — a short anonymous survey (around five minutes per team member) that measures the gap between the emotions people are currently feeling at work and the emotions they want to feel. Run before kickoff and again at month six, it gives the team a concrete read on whether the work moved anything.
No. The work surfaces what's actually being felt because that's where most team friction lives, but the output is operational: specific accountability rituals (meeting structures, recognition practices, conflict protocols) that the team uses going forward. The goal is sustained behaviour change, not a debriefing experience.
The default is a half-day kickoff session, two follow-up sessions over two to three months, and the pre/post Pulse measurement. Can be compressed to a single full-day intensive or extended into a six-month integration with monthly touch-points.
Everyone whose emotional experience at work is part of the culture you're trying to shift. Usually that's the full leadership team and their direct reports. The leader being honest in the room is non-negotiable — the work fails if the leader is performing rather than participating.
Short conversation about your team and what you'd want the Emotional Culture work to do. James designs a proposal from there.
Email james@christensencoaching.com