The Culture Execution Playbook for Founders Part 2: Startup Culture Transformation

Jörn Menninger
May 13, 2025
14 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Scale startup culture with trust, habits, and KPIs. Discover how eNPS and daily behaviors transform leadership ROI fast.

What Is This About?

The Culture Execution Playbook Part 2 continues the deep dive into startup culture transformation with Christian Conrad. This second installment moves from theory to implementation — covering the specific practices, rituals, and accountability structures that make culture change stick.

Introduction

Culture is easy to talk about but notoriously difficult to execute — especially in fast-growing startups where every quarter brings new team members, new challenges, and new pressures. This second part of the Culture Execution Playbook moves from theory to implementation, providing founders with concrete systems for embedding cultural values into hiring processes, performance management, decision-making frameworks, and daily team operations.

Part 2 of the Culture Execution Playbook moves from theory to implementation with concrete systems for embedding cultural values into daily operations. Key implementation areas include hiring process integration, performance management alignment, decision-making frameworks, and team ritual design. Companies that systematize culture through operational processes rather than relying on leadership charisma maintain cultural consistency through scaling and leadership transitions. The playbook provides templates for each system that can be adapted to different company stages and team sizes.

Scale startup culture with trust, habits, and KPIs. Startuprad.io brings you independent coverage of the key developments shaping the startup and venture capital landscape across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

This founder interview is part of our ongoing coverage of Scaleup Founder Interviews from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Why long-term culture transformation beats one-off training—and how trust, habits, and measurable engagement build ROI.

🪢 What Most Corporate Culture Programs Get Wrong

Leadership coach Christian Conrad returns for Part 2 of our Startuprad.io conversation with a reality check on startup culture transformation:

Most corporate L&D initiatives are just expensive encouragement with no follow-up.

He’s seen it too many times—trainings without behavioral change, feedback without data, and engagement programs without accountability.

That’s why his approach focuses on execution, measurement, and trust. Not slogans.

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🔧 Culture Isn’t a Workshop—It’s a System

In fast-growth environments, culture must evolve from intervention to infrastructure.

Conrad’s culture transformation system:

Start at the Top: Train leadership first.
Roll It Down: Cascade training across teams.
Track It: Use KPIs like eNPS and behavior tracking.
Stick With It: Run engagements over 12+ months.

“Short bursts don’t shift behavior. Habits do.”

He even backs it with AI-driven habit apps to nudge and track daily cultural behaviors.

🤝 The Trust Paradigm Shift: 100% First

"I give 100% trust from Day 1. If it's abused, I deduct."

That’s the principle Christian learned from a Danish GM at Kellogg’s.

Why it works:

Empowers initiative
Replaces fear with ownership
Drives bold ideas, faster execution, and deeper loyalty

The result? Emotional commitment that boosts measurable business performance.

🪡 From Habits to Culture: The 3 Execution Levers

Conrad uses the 4DX framework (Four Disciplines of Execution) to move from theory to daily impact:

Wildly Important Goal → e.g. +20 eNPS in 12 months
Lead Measures → Connective Listening, Positive Reinforcement, Feedforward
Visible Scoreboard → Cultural KPIs tracked publicly

Every leader gets a behavioral toolkit. Every team sees the scoreboard.

🌟 Case Study: From 6 to 40 eNPS in 18 Months

A fast-growing renewable energy company (listed on the TecDAX) implemented Christian's full program.

The result?

eNPS climbed from 6 to 40
Employer brand value skyrocketed
Retention and recruiting costs improved

And this wasn’t a fluke. Christian knew 60–80% of the employees personally and worked with them over 7 years.

✍️ Founders: Start With These 3 Micro-Habits Tomorrow

Christian’s no-fluff launch plan for startup leaders:

eNPS Field Research: Ask 10 employees if they’d recommend the company. Ask follow-ups.
Quick Wins: Prioritize 3 process tweaks or cultural pain points. Fix them this quarter.
Daily Practice:
- Repeat what you hear in meetings
- Ask open-ended questions
- Practice Feedforward weekly ("How can I improve?")

Small shifts. Consistently. That’s the secret.

🔗 Startup Culture Transformation - Related Reads:

🚀 Quote to Steal:

“Culture becomes operational, not ornamental.”

🙌 Over to You:

Which leadership habit had the biggest impact in your company? Drop us a comment or share this post with a founder who needs it.

Automated Transcript

Music:

Speaker1: Hello and welcome everybody. Welcome to the second interview together with my guest, Christian Conrad, here, a former marketing director for Kellogg's in the Dach region, Axie Unilever, founder of Engagement Booster and author of Magical Company Culture in German, Magische Unternehmenskultur, on his mission to have one million smiling employees by 2035. And we've been recording for 50 minutes already, part one of our episode. So let's do the second episode here and go a little bit into solution systems and strategic impact of your work. Can you share a story where client turned their employee employer brand around through cultural work?

Speaker0: I'll give you two very, very different examples. The earliest example that I had was over 10 years ago when I worked with the Naturkundermuseum, in Berlin and I supported the new then new general director of the Institute, Professor Johannes Vogel and his team for two years. And that was a fascinating journey because it was completely different. I'm a company, corporate, whatever business guy working in this kind of scientific community environment was fascinating and developing a new vision, a new mission and seeing how visionary leadership could actually transform a very, very stale, very kind of old fashioned organization into a fantastic and inspiring organization now, 10 years later. Um, it's very, I mean, I, I. We, we gave them a little bit of an initial kickstart and then they, and they were running. Um, but that was, that was a dramatic change of culture and employee, um, attractiveness as well.

Speaker0: Um, and performance as well. And the other one is more recent. Um, it's, it's, it's for a, for a, um, smallish company, but listed in the tech docs in the environmental, um, in the, in the, um, renewable energies, uh, sector. And we changed the net promoter score from six to 40 and 18 months. Um, re creating a big shift in an employee brand and attractiveness as an employer in a company that is in an environment that is fast growth, um, double digit growth, um, year by year of over 10%. So that is the other story that I'm very proud of and I'm very excited about. And that's the story that goes on.

Speaker1: Where do traditional corporate L&D programs fall short and how does your approach differ?

Speaker0: I think one thing that I've run loads of learning and development initiatives and programs in a number of companies, big and small for the last 15, 17 years. And a lot of them are, I would call them interventionists. You run a training, you go away, you don't measure results. In a sense, it's almost like an incentive. Oh, you're allowed to go to a training. And there is very little follow-up and very little. It frustrated me that me as someone who is a facilitator or a mentor or coach in such a situation, you hardly ever get the long-term feedback. You know, you get the feedback at the end of the session. Oh, we loved the session. Well, what's actually the impact on any kind of metrics? I was involved in some programs where I found that they did it a little better because they didn't run a program over a year where there were several modules.

Speaker0: You know, so that's already an improvement. And what I did as a result of that, I said, I want a program that actually measures success and that is continuous because I want to see the impact. I don't want to run trainings because I love trainings, but a training or a coaching session is a part, a module of a program with a clear objective of driving engagement. We measure it we run a certain sequence we start at the top we break it down into all into the leadership and then we roll it out in the organization and then you can really see how how it works and how it impacts so i like long-term projects rather than short interventions because I think they have a bigger impact on results.

Speaker1: Actually, when I was in consulting, I also loved to do the long-running projects for the very simple reason that there is a lot more impact and final results that you're seeing, not to mention you get more acquainted with the matter, with the company you're working for, with culture of them, like all the different branches all across the globe and how they're actually interacting. So you learn more and you can over time more and more tailor your approach to this client. That's just personal experience here.

Speaker0: Exactly. That's another really good aspect that you can only tailor things to a company if you know them well. You know, so, um, if I only go in for a day or two, it's not quite naturally, very superficial the knowledge that I have, but for example, let's take that client in the renewable energy sector. I know every single person in leadership. I know probably 60 to 80% of all employees because I've had the, the. Pleasure and the honor to work with them for seven years now. So I know them and I can therefore tailor anything that I do for them much more to their needs than I could if it was just someone I knew because we just met.

Speaker1: Do you now have a question because we're talking about like it feels like two different perspectives, the number-driven management and emotional driven leadership. So how does your Covey certified work on execution connect with emotional leadership? Because for a lot of people, there's actually two pair of shoes, like we would say in Germany. But I do believe it is not.

Speaker0: Well, I believe it's not. I think I used to work for execution, you know, the execution, um, model of, of, of, um, 40 X, uh, of, of coffee. And that framework is at the back of my head when I run any kind of engagement booster program, you know, the, the, the risk, the four disciplines are, you know, have focus on one key big goal. So the focus then is engagement. You need to measure it. Otherwise, it won't be a wildly important goal in the 40X terminology. You need to be able to have that kind of measure that you can track and then focus on the lead measures. That's discipline too, and the lead measures are the habits. So the habits, connective listening, positive reinforcement, and feed forward, those three habits, those three lead measures that are the lever that drives it. And that makes the soft, and then you should track your results.

Speaker0: You should track also how you do the, how you practice the habits, which is why I offer my clients an app, an AI-driven app that supports them in developing those habits. Because obviously, you know, you need something to help you to actually think about, okay, am I actually doing the habits or in all the everyday madness that we're all involved in? So we need something that reminds you, something that gives you some impulses automatically as you go. But the key is, if you want to move it from something that's fluffy and soft into something that's hard and measurable, it's about execution. It's about what you do every day. It's about developing habits. It's about changing your behavior as a leader. And I had a beautiful example last week at a workshop with a client when one guy from operations, so that was, you know, in production of a client, when he said, you know,

Speaker0: my colleague was at the training three weeks ago and he changed his behavior. I said, oh, that's interesting. What did he change? Well, he used to interrupt people in meetings all the time. And I noticed that since he's been to the training, he doesn't do that anymore. So that's a very tangible little story of someone taking that on board and saying, okay, this was very useful for me. I have a tool now and I've learned connective listening. And it's something that we've practiced in the workshop and I'm applying it as a leader in my team. And he leads about, I don't know, 30, 40 people, um, and the colleague and he, you know, have sort of neighboring teams. That's why they interact a lot. And within only two to two or three weeks, he already had a noticeable change of behavior that had an impact.

Speaker1: There's also something I need to work on, not interrupting people. I see. You coach leaders to trust first. What are the business outcomes of that mindset?

Speaker0: Well, I'll tell you what inspired me. It was probably the manager that inspired me most. When I worked at Kellogg's, I was marketing director and our general manager was a Danish guy called Fleming. And Fleming, when he presented himself to the organization, he put himself in front of everybody and said, I've got some management principles. And one of them is when I work with someone like you guys, I always give 100% trust. And only if that trust is abused, I will deduct. And for us, that was a huge paradigm shift because we came from a culture more of fear where you could be really happy if you had 20% trust of the management. So we had to cover our answers. We had to be careful. We had to hold back. And we didn't feel we could do a lot. We were not empowered. When Fleming told us, give you a hundred percent trust and only if you abuse

Speaker0: it, I deduct, he gave us a vote of confidence. And that released a lot of energy in a turnaround situation. Um, and the best business benefits, better ideas, more empowerment, more initiative, um, more boldness, um. Better, better, better, better execution, um, better teamwork. And you could fit figures behind all of those in terms of business impact. And I think anybody who's listening, who's running an organization, probably knows what I'm talking about. You know, if people actually believe in themselves, and I could feel it as, I could feel that trust and confidence. And the emotional signal that it gave me or the little voice in my head said, wow, I don't want to disappoint him. You know, that's a strong driver. You don't, someone who gives you that kind of trust, you don't want to disappoint him. You want to honor that trust. That drives intrinsic motivation.

Speaker0: It's not an extrinsic thing. It's not a bonus payment.

Speaker1: Mm-hmm. I see. I actually, I think once or twice in my life, I had leadership like this in different companies with different clients. But that was really, really rare. That is something I would really call management talent. That's pretty cool. And actually, if your employees see you like that, you've already won. I was wondering for like the closing words, what is your best advice for founders or executives who want to start tomorrow?

Speaker0: I think the first thing that you should do is you should, if you want to really start tomorrow, you go to 10 people in your organization and you ask them, can I have five minutes of your time? And you ask them that question, you know, you ask them exactly that question. How likely is it that you will recommend our company to someone else? You do your own little field research. You know, you don't do a big survey. You do your own little field research. And don't just pick the people who are fans anyway, but pick a couple, you know, who you know are critical and ask them then, you know, if they say, okay, I'm an aide. I say, okay, good. what do I need to do or what do we need to do as a management team, as an organization, so that you will give us a 9 or a 10 on that question.

Speaker0: How likely is it that we recommend X, Y, Z as an employer to others? And you will find that you will get some really good ideas. So that's the first step. The second step would be that you sit together, evaluate what you've just found out in your little field research, and make a few, prioritize three or four actions where you will improve the framework that you're working in. Whatever it is, process improvement, nicer canteen, whatever, you know, and pick small measures that you can execute within a maximum of a quarter so that you see results. Don't do the big things, do the small things, do many small things, regular. Do like three, four things every quarter for four consecutive quarters. And the third thing is start practicing those habits. You know, if you, if you, if you say, okay, I don't know what connective listening is, just type in active listening or empathic listening and to chat GPT and

Speaker0: tell, and ask to us, you know, let them tell you what you should train and what you should look for. And then practice that. Be simple, you know. Try to avoid judgment when you're listening. Repeat what you have heard to make sure that the other person feels understood. Focus on open-ended questions to start with what or how and avoid why and all the police questions. So, you know, you do that and your world will change. The world around you will change. You do that consistently, small things every day. Positive reinforcement. Catch people doing things right rather than doing things wrong. And ask for feet forward yourself. Is there something where you would like to be better, where you want to improve? You're the CEO. There is something that you want to improve. Every week, one of the things that you want to improve on, you go to two or

Speaker0: three people and ask them, you know, I've got this thing I want to improve. What tips do you have for me? No discussion. just accept their advice, their tips, and that builds connection. It shows you humility, but it also instills excellence in the organization, the drive for continuous improvement. So you do those three things. You do those three things, measure, get some actions on the way, and start implementing those habits, and you will transform your organization within 12 months.

Speaker1: Final question. What advice when you started out a management career in more classical companies, what advice would you have loved to have at the point you started?

Speaker0: I think that I would have loved to have had, those lessons that I learned from Fleming 10 years later, straight from the bat. You know, the thing that you give trust initially, that you try to focus on the strengths and the things that you're good at, that your team is good at, I think that would have been great.

Speaker1: I see. For our audience, I was wondering which leadership behavior made you feel seen and empowered at work. Drop us a DM or comment on YouTube or wherever you are following us. We might feature it in our next episode. Christian, thank you very much. It was a pleasure having you as a guest. We may add to our audience that we are now recording for almost one hour and 20 minutes. The final episodes will be a little bit shorter. But nonetheless, we will be on Substack for a little bit exclusive deep dive for our paying customers there. And thank you very much. It was a pleasure having you so long here.

Speaker0: Thanks a lot, Jan. Thanks a lot for the great interview.

Speaker1: Totally my pleasure. Have a good day. bye bye cheers bye bye

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Jörn "Joe" Menninger → Host of → Startuprad.io

What is this article about: The Culture Execution Playbook for Founders Part 2: Startup Culture Transformation?

Scale startup culture with trust, habits, and KPIs. Discover how eNPS and daily behaviors transform leadership ROI fast.

What are the main takeaways from this discussion?

How does this topic connect to the broader startup ecosystem?

About the Host

Joern "Joe" Menninger is the host of the Startuprad.io podcast and covers founders, investors, and policy developments across the DACH startup ecosystem. Through more than 1,300 interviews and nearly a decade of reporting, he documents the evolution of the European startup landscape. Follow Joern on LinkedIn.

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