It’s one of the most persistent problems in business: What are the best ways of identifying and developing the practices that produce high-performing teams?
I’ve grappled with this problem for most of my professional life. Those of you who know me well will understand why this question has transfixed me for so long, but for those who don’t: I joined Bridgewater Associates right out of college, landing on founder Ray Dalio’s team at a time when he was intensely focused on transitioning to others the management of the company that he had built from his two-bedroom apartment into the largest hedge fund in the world. For more than a decade, I worked closely with Ray on projects aimed at understanding what drove the success of the company up until that point, and how to sustain that success into the future.
At a higher level, the transition question we were working on is obviously a larger question about what drives long term success of any organization, and specifically a question about culture. People—even senior ones—come and go from companies all the time. It is the culture that endures and sets the blueprint for long term success.
If you’ve worked with Ray or you follow him on social media, you know that he is a big believer in the importance of culture—or what he often calls a “way of being” that established it was the culture–a distinctive approach to collective decision-making, problem-solving, and the deliberate development of people. At Bridgewater, this culture centered on the pursuit of meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical truthfulness and radical transparency. My work with Ray centered on building out tools and practices to help this culture sustain itself, including communicating our own principles and practices, building training and development around them, and even building an ecosystem of products – a people and culture management system – to support specific key behaviors throughout the organization.
After a long process and lots of learning, Ray successfully handed the firm over in 2022. Around that time, based on a lot of great conversations with other founder-leaders facing similar dilemmas, we spun the culture work into a new company, Principles, with an aim of helping other companies better understand their cultures and implement practices for making them more effective.
Tools to Develop Culture
Our goal was not to bring Bridgewater’s specific culture to other firms; it was to develop general purpose practices and tools to help any company, in any industry, build and refine the culture that’s best for them. Our approach can be described in a simple equation:
What you and those you work with are like (Your People)
+
How you are with each other (Your Culture)
=
Your success
Our first step was to build tools that helped other organizations invest in and live out their own culture and develop their people most effectively. To do this, we engaged some of the best psychologists in the world – Adam Grant, Brian Little and others –and to build tools that could provide deep insight into the most important realities individuals and teams faced about themselves, those they worked with, and their shared culture. But insight alone isn’t enough. The products we’ve built are designed in a way that drives effectiveness and well-being in individuals and teams, offering an actionable roadmap for continuous improvement.
Our products include:
- PrinciplesYou – A free personality assessment designed for individuals to better understand themselves and how they interact with others.
- PrinciplesUs – A team-based platform that leverages the assessment to strengthen collaboration, communication, and effectiveness within teams.
- Principles Culture Assessment – A scientifically validated diagnostic developed with Dr. Jamie Shapiro, CEO & Founder of Connected EC. It’s built on our 5 Cs model of culture and is designed to help organizations measure and improve culture at both the organizational and team levels.
We’ve seen that combining great, scientifically backed tools with the power of skilled coaching and digital interventions embedded directly in the tools themselves, has a measurable impact on the development of people and culture. And the progress in AI allows us to scale these solutions in ways that weren’t possible before.
Looking Ahead
For me, it’s now been nearly fifteen years of wrestling with questions of culture, and it’s clearer than ever that this is a critical area that, while discussed a lot, remains poorly understood. A few simple data points:
- 72% of executives agree that corporate culture impacts financial performance, but only 46% hold themselves and their teams accountable for culture.
- 94% of employees are more likely to remain with a company that invests in their development, saving companies the 2x salary cost of replacing them.
- Organizations where managers received regular feedback saw 8.9% higher profitability.’
So we’re now working with companies of all sizes, from startups to some of the largest public companies all over the world. In every case, it’s so cool to see how investing in the right way people and culture – through feedback, candid communication and intentional development at all levels – provides a robust foundation for more engaged, higher performing teams.
We’d love to hear from you—how are you investing in your own development and your team’s culture? Let’s continue the conversation.
