TBL: The One Program That Transformed Our Culture

Of all the cultural initiatives I have seen, this one offers by far the best ROI

A few years ago, one of our team members shared her dream with us.

What she wanted more than anything at that moment was to visit her grandmother with her young child. The grandmother lived in another country and was unable to travel, so she had never met her great-grandchild.

One of my most treasured moments as CEO was when I invited this employee on stage at our all-company summit and announced that we had arranged and paid for her to visit her grandmother with her toddler. Later that year, our company Slack was pinged with photos of our employee, her daughter and her grandmother, a happy ending that prompted many kind comments from our team.

That single experience did more for our culture than any bonus, party, or perk ever could. It reminded everyone that we cared about our team members as whole people, not just employees.

This is the power of The Dream Program, my favorite culture initiative we implemented during my time as CEO at Acceleration Partners. The Dream Program was pioneered by John Ratliff at Appletree Answers and inspired by Matthew Kelly’s fictional book The Dream Manager. The concept is simple but profound: employees are invited to share a personal or professional dream, and company leaders choose a handful to fulfill.

Over the years, we introduced people to key professional mentors, gave them training to complete a marathon or triathlon, helped them track down a long lost relative, and even helped them join the board of a charity organization for a disease their child had. The wishes vary greatly, but the result of granting them is always the same: a surge of gratitude, connection, and pride that ripples through the entire organization.

Over the years, I’ve seen countless cultural initiatives in my own business and other leaders’ companies. Few have the enduring impact or return on investment of the Dream Program.

If you’re serious about building a culture that truly puts people first, a Dream Program is a great place to start. And it’s surprisingly easy and inexpensive to launch one.

Over the years, so many leaders have asked for the details of our program so that they can start their own. For the first time, I put together a detailed guide that walks you through how to set up a program like this for your team or company. The Dream Guide is available in our new Resource Vault, which contains links to all the different practices and systems I have shared over the years. While some are reserved for Friday Forward Premium subscribers, several resources are available for everyone.

The Better Leader (TBL) is a bi-weekly newsletter that delivers a strategic playbook for leaders, drawn from my 20 years of leadership experience and insights from top CEOs and leaders I’ve worked with. Each edition is concise and tactical, providing frameworks you can implement immediately to elevate your leadership and your team. TBL is available exclusively to Friday Forward premium subscribers.