The strongest culture I’ve ever been part of was when I joined a company based in East Africa. We lived in a small village for at least two years. The entire management team lived the mission. Our headquarters were in the field, not tucked away in capital cities. We worked alongside our clients, day in and day out. You could see the company’s impact in nearly everything you did. We were in Gemba.

This was fifteen years ago, but the company was ahead of its time. The only thing that mattered were results. Outcome was the only priority. You could work from home. We had a flat structure. The mission came first. Team members were expected to stay for a minimum of two years, and most stayed twice as long. Managers were judged by the performance and growth of their team members. Bad hiring or bad mentorship was cause for immediate correction. Promotions were earned through project success, not tenure.

How? We were driven by culture. Paraphrasing: Clients first, Go to Gemba, Work smart, Build. I still remember these mottos to this day.

The result for the company: less time spent on management, better results.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. We dealt with geopolitical instability, agricultural droughts, a constant wave of technological transformation, and lightning. We operated across eight countries, juggling time zones, languages, and the realities of remote work before Zoom was even a thing. But the company succeeded enormously because of this culture: Clients first, Go to Gemba, Work smart, Build.

So what has changed in the world of AI agents?

Well, it’s easier to build things that last. It’s easier to brainstorm. It’s easier to get best practices at your fingertips. But, truthfully, it isn’t that different. Bain’s scale insurgency (2019) principles should still hold. A strong culture will allow an FP&A team to explore, build, achieve success, and repeat without endless alignment meetings.

By focusing on this culture, and reinforcing in your role as a coach, you enable your team to independently shift from:

• Putting together board decks -> To automate the deck and focusing on implementing the findings

• Doing ‘data checks’ -> Set up automated agents that ensures your systems are the source of truth

• “Manning the stations” -> To strengthen the story of your business

To do this you want to coach a team where each member innovates independently.

This is how you keep pace with the speed of innovation in an automated world.

Let's get to work:

1. Set your cultural principles

Embrace the world of automation, and set your team principles accordingly. These will invariably be different, but you want to re-orient your team around a building mentality. Update your principles and then make sure they are used. To do so:

• Know your team. Not every team is full of rockstars. If you are in a startup, many times you are paying a lot less. Orient your team around their strengths and lean into them. Sometimes you have a move-fast-and-break-things team and other times a deliberate-long-term-thinking team.’ Design your principles to play to the strengths of your team.

• Establish core principles. Create four or five core principles that handle different parts of the process. See the chart below. I would strongly suggest including something around:

  • Build and Automate. You want to continually improve the FP&A function by building tools/agents. Today, this will likely mean leveraging automated reconciliations, data checks, and similar tools to focus on strategy.

  • Celebrate curiosity. Now, people have amazing trainers at their fingertips. All they have to do is ask how to make something quicker, more insightful, automated.

• Present it out to the team. Present the general principles to the team, and get people’s buy-in. Walk through what this culture will actually mean.

We will get into how to reinforce these principles below, but laying out the culture that matters for your team is your foundation. It allows people to move quickly and in sync.

Tip: There are trade-offs. Everybody wants fast perfection, but it’s rarely possible. Focus on what you prefer vs. the others. Inspiration from Amazon’s Day 1 to Netflix Freedom and Responsibility to Spotify’s autonomy still holds.

2. Repeat, repeat, and embody, embody

Culture takes time. Now that you have the cultural principles, they need to be consistently applied over time. This is the easier part, but it’s stunning how quickly people do a single presentation, keep it up for a quarter, and then forget it only to start anew. Sound familiar?

• Weekly email. Key performance for the week. Highlight an individual win or two and the principles they followed. This is your narrative.

• Monthly call. Yes, you should have one. List your principles up top. Everyone should contribute their wins, specifically tied to the outcomes and principles.

• Consistent 1-on-1s. Meet with your team members at least once a month, or if you prefer, 15 minutes a week. This is critical to develop team members and keep teams feeling the benefits of a flat structure. A further article will go more in-depth.

• Good manager “hygiene.” Make sure you do what you say and handle all the “HR Admin” in a professional manner. There’s a reason it is considered best practice as it helps your team and has worked across a lot of places.

Everyone likes consistency so they can build and innovate without the added stress of not knowing what the team admires. If you are inconsistent, so will be the team.

Tip: It takes about two calls for the principles to sound less ‘cheesy’ and more natural. That is when you know the culture is on the uptake.

3. Create the guideposts

Now, your team goals need to reinforce these team goals. There are lots of ways to do it, but what I have found most successful:

• Build your team’s roadmap. We touched on this briefly, but it should be clear that the things that the team is creating will unlock gains in automations and improvements.

• Create the narrative. Where you came from, where you are headed, and why. It keeps your team moving forward independently.

• Use OKRs. Most people know them from past experience, so it's easy to implement. I’m not going to go into how to set OKRs in this case (if you need help, 03 GPT-It).

• Track publicly. Be proud of your team’s performance, even the failures. By publicly tracking the team results, you set the tone of being transparent and living what you say.

The metrics need to reinforce your culture, else suddenly you will have two disparate sets of guiding principles which creates confusion you don’t need.

Tip: Add a column that says “relevant principle” to your OKRs, and make sure you set your initial rounds of targets to be achievable. Success breeds success.

4. Now, Coach with culture

It’s up to you to be a great coach for your team that embodies its culture. If you don’t, it won’t stick. Being a great coach hasn’t changed. The basics:

• Listen first. You aren’t doing the work. Listen, understand the problem, offer suggestions. Cite your cultural principles when providing feedback.

• Require team members to prepare solutions first. Each team member should bring a solution to any problem they spot, even if they’re unsure. Then, you can guide appropriately.

• Encourage sideways communication. Way too often there are up-sideways-down feedback loops. Encourage team members to talk directly to each other if a finding can help somewhere else. This is critical now, when AI automation learnings are often cross-functional.

• Give fast, specific feedback. Don’t let people send something and then wait a week to hear back. Be quick and clear in your wording so people know exactly how to improve.

• Own the losses, celebrate the wins. If someone on your team makes a mistake, it’s your mistake. Own it. When someone does great work, give them the credit. Basics.

• Stay calm under pressure. Tough times will come. Stay calm and cite your principles. People want consistency. Staying calm gives your team the space to create real solutions while you take the heat.

There are tons of great resources out there. For more, check out Mckinsey articles on leadership as they’re a strong place to start.

Tip: Link the cultural expectations at the top of each document as a reference. Small bits of constant reinforcement greatly help.

5. Aside on the hybrid or in-office setup

The benefits of hybrid or remote setups are real. But, what’s not great? Coming into the office, finding nobody there, and spending the whole day on calls. Lean into the setup you actually want.

• Lead by example. If your team is hybrid, be hybrid. If they are remote, be remote, etc. The key is being clear about what you are doing.

• Be clear on your schedule. Where you are, when you will communicate.

• Make coming into the office worth it. Talk to people. Get people talking to each other. That’s the only real benefit of being there, so make it happen. This is much more effective than bringing in fruit.

• Document digitally. Use the same tech tools to summarize decisions, conversations, and context. Make meetings effective for everyone.

• Batch meetings. Stack meetings on days when most people are in (or require it if you can). In-person meetings are better. Phones down, laptops closed, people focused.

These principles work across any setup. It just depends on what you want your team to be. Make the call.

Tip: When working across time zones it is helpful to set the expectation, “send whenever, reply on your time unless otherwise indicated.”

In conclusion

Building a strong culture that integrates a build-and-move-on mentality will enable your teams to move faster without endless direction. You want to focus on and promote people who are automating, improving, and building your team so that everyone spends less time on work that can be automated.

Build the right culture and the results will build upon themselves. Godspeed.