Why I created the 10 behaviours — and what 15 years of using them taught me

We were scaling fast — doubling headcount, year on year — and the standard hiring playbook wasn't working the way we needed it to. Write a job description. Post it. Assess who came back. Hire the closest match.

The problem wasn't finding people with the right skills. The problem was that skills alone didn't tell us much about who would thrive. We kept seeing it: two people with near-identical experience, and six months in, one of them was extraordinary — magnetic, decisive, constantly raising the standard around them — and the other was competent but somehow less than the sum of their parts.

We wanted to understand why.

How we deconstructed the behaviours of our best people — and what we found

So we did what any obsessive team does when they notice a pattern they can't explain. We started studying the outliers. Not their CVs. Their behaviours. How they communicated in difficult moments. Whether they challenged things they disagreed with. How they talked about customers when no customer was in the room. Whether they picked up problems that weren't technically theirs to solve.

The painted picture

We had an advantage most organisations don't give themselves: we had a Painted Picture. A clear, shared, written account of where we were going and what kind of organisation we were building. That gave us something concrete to deconstruct against. It wasn't "what do good employees look like generally" — it was "what do the people who are already living this future look like, right now, in our organisation."

The answer came back as ten behaviours.

I published them as a free ebook — available at cultivatedmanagement.com/ten — and I've used them in my own companies and in consulting engagements ever since. Somewhere north of a hundred workshops at this point. Across industries, organisation sizes, geographies.

And here's the thing that might be the most useful observation I can offer: almost nobody changes the list.

I always open those workshops the same way. Before I show my ten, I ask the room: what behaviours do you want your culture to embody? Start with five if ten feels like too many. Write them on the wall. Let's see what you've got.

Every time, without fail, we end up back at something very close to these ten.

Which on one reading is reassuring — validation that these are genuinely the right things. But the more important reading is different. The list isn't the hard part. Deciding what culture you actually want, with enough clarity to describe it, and enough honesty to hold it up against what you're currently tolerating — that's where most organisations stall.

That's a Painted Picture problem, not a behaviours problem. You can't reverse-engineer behaviours from a blurry destination. The reason these ten work when organisations apply them seriously is that they force a specific kind of reckoning: are we actually building the company we said we were building? Are the people we're hiring, retaining, and promoting the people who embody that?

Most of the time, when you hold that mirror up, the answer is uncomfortable.

The behaviours themselves are below — along with the coaching guide if you want a structured way to work with them, whether as a manager developing your team or as an individual developing yourself.

But before you go to the list: spend some time on the destination. Know what culture you're building. The behaviours will mean something different, and land more effectively, once you do.