How to Design Core Commitments
By Joe Newsum
Designing core commitments is one of my all-time favorite projects. It brings together creativity, collaboration, research, psychology, and strategy into one intense piece of work, understanding what a culture actually is today, defining what it needs to become, and then building the core commitments that set the language, the thinking, and the behaviors to get there. When it lands, it unlocks the true potential of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. There is almost nothing more satisfying. Let me show you how it is done.
The Core Idea
Designing core commitments is a creative and strategic act, not a committee exercise. You choose some key behaviors from a universal palette, then craft them into language that is short, directive, emotionally true to your company, and impossible for a competitor to copy.
There are two halves to this work, and you cannot skip either. First, choosing: deciding which key behaviors your organization most needs to drive. Second, crafting: turning those behaviors into language that actually shapes how people think and act. (If you have not yet, start with what a core commitment is and what makes one powerful.) Most organizations rush the first half and fumble the second. This page walks through both, plus the process that produces commitments a leadership team will genuinely own.
Start With the Palette, Not a Blank Page
There is no universal list of core commitments, but there is a universal palette of behaviors that organizations draw from. The reason the same behaviors recur is simple: every organization faces the same underlying problems of trust, coordination, and getting things done through people. Some behaviors are near-universal, needed almost everywhere. Others are tailored, elevated by what a particular company competes on. Designing your commitments starts with looking at this palette and asking which behaviors your organization most needs.
The Palette of Organizational Behaviors
Every organization draws from the same palette. The selection and emphasis are what make it yours.
Near-universal: almost every organization needs these
Accountability Ownership Outcome orientation Communication & candor Collaboration Learning & curiosity Integrity Respect
Tailored: elevated by what the organization competes on
Creativity Innovation Customer orientation Precision & quality Safety Speed & decisiveness Craft Developing people Resilience
| The Palette of Organizational Behaviors © Stratechi 2026. All rights reserved. | STRATECHI.COM |
How to Choose the Right Ones
Choosing is an act of strategy, not preference. The near-universal behaviors are table stakes, and most organizations will commit to several of them, because you cannot run a healthy company without accountability, candor, and collaboration. The real decisions happen at the margins: which of the near-universal behaviors most need reinforcing given where you are weak, and which tailored behaviors your strategy demands you elevate.
The sharpest question to ask is this: what does your strategy demand that your people think about instinctively? For a frontline, customer-facing company, the answer is the customer, so customer orientation has to be elevated even though it is not on every company’s list. For a research-driven company, it is curiosity and rigor. For a hospital or an airline, it is precision and safety. Your core commitments should concentrate where two things overlap: the behaviors your culture is currently missing, and the behaviors your strategy most depends on.
Keep the set to four to seven. The discipline of a short list forces the hard prioritization that makes a culture coherent. A list of a dozen commitments is not a culture, it is a wish list, and no one will remember it.
Look at the palette. Which four to seven behaviors would most change how your organization operates if everyone truly committed to them? That short list is the raw material of your core commitments.
What You Are Really Writing: The Team’s Leadership Philosophy
One reframe changes how you approach the entire exercise. As I laid out on the core commitments page, a set of core commitments is the collective leadership and management philosophy of the executive team, written down and idealized to its best version. Two implications follow for the design work. It cannot be outsourced, copied from another company, or handed to HR to draft, because the commitments only carry weight as the genuine beliefs of the people at the top. And the raw material already exists: your job is not to invent a philosophy but to mine the one your leaders already hold and give it its best language. That is exactly what the process below is built to do.
If your executive team had to write down the leadership and management philosophy they genuinely believe in and try to live, what would it say? That, idealized to its best version, is your core commitments.
The Process: Where the Real Magic Happens
Here is where most organizations go wrong. They gather a committee around a whiteboard, brainstorm from a blank page, and vote on words. That produces generic mush, because committees average toward the safe and the obvious. Designing core commitments is a creative and strategic act, and creative work needs a strong starting point, not a blank page. The process that actually works runs in a deliberate order, and parts of it are genuinely my favorite work I do.
1Immerse in the company and gather the context
Everything starts with deep context. I meet with the executive team, review the engagement survey results to understand what people are really feeling, watch town hall recordings and other videos of executives talking about the business, and learn the company’s history, business model, and strategy cold. I also sit with each executive one on one to understand their strategy, their management philosophy, and the language they already use. Every executive has built up hard-won beliefs over a career about how work should be done, and they are usually thrilled to finally put them into words. I am also listening for the language already alive in the building, the phrases leaders repeat in town halls and meetings. The best core commitments are rarely invented. They are mined from the philosophies and language the organization already speaks and believes.
2Build the strawman, where it all comes together
Then I take everything the immersion surfaced and build a strawman: a complete, specific first draft of the core commitments, with headlines, language, and the behaviors behind them. This is the creative heart of the work, and it is far better done by one or two people with a point of view than by a committee. The strawman is almost always the aha moment. When the executive team sees their own scattered philosophies and language pulled together into one coherent cultural vision, something clicks. They see the whole, they see how it fits their strategy, and they see something their competitors will have a hard time replicating. That recognition is what turns a project into a movement.
3Iterate the strawman one on one, CEO first
This is the part I love most. Before the strawman ever goes to a group, I take it back to the executives one on one, starting with the CEO. We go over it line by line, and they react, push, and add. Then I take their input, sharpen the strawman, and bring it to the next executive, and the next, iterating round after round until the language is genuinely right. This private iteration is where the real alignment and ownership get built, long before the room ever meets. By the time the full team gathers, the strawman is already strong and already theirs, so the group session can build energy instead of fighting over a blank page.
4Finalize as a team and turn toward launch
With the strawman already strong from the one-on-one iteration, the full team comes together to finalize the core commitments and the storyline around them: why these, why now, how they connect to the strategy and the company’s history. This is also where each commitment gets deepened with its sub-commitments, the specific behaviors and best practices that turn a headline into an operating standard. These sessions are energizing in a way most corporate work is not, because for the first time the team sees the whole thing come together and feels the potential of getting culture right. And this is where the conversation starts to shift from designing the commitments to launching and living them, how they will be rolled out, reinforced, and turned into the way the organization actually works.
The strawman is the unlock. A blank whiteboard gets you integrity, excellence, teamwork, the words on every other company’s wall. A strong strawman, built from the language and philosophies your leaders already live, gets you a cultural vision they instantly recognize as theirs and competitors cannot copy.
The Art of the Language
Choosing the behaviors is the strategy. The language is the art, and it is what separates commitments people live from words people walk past. The craft is taking a behavior from the palette and giving it language that is specific, memorable, and a little bit demanding, language unmistakably yours.
A good illustration of the craft: a client wanted his people to feel pride in the company, the kind where at a party you say where you work with your chest out. Pride is the emotion. But emotion alone does not shape behavior in the moment. The first instinct was Take Pride in Everything You Do, which turns the emotion into a directive. That is good. But you can go further. Own It is sharper still, because it is active, immediate, and works in any moment: you can own a conversation, own a mistake, own a result. The art is translating what the organization feels and needs into language that actually directs behavior when it counts.
What makes core commitment language work
A directive, not a description. It tells people what to do, not what to value. Own It, not ownership.
Short enough to recall in the moment. If it cannot come to mind in the middle of a hard conversation, it cannot shape the conversation.
Emotionally true to your culture. The word that resonates at one company falls flat at another. Pride, grit, craft, and care are not interchangeable.
Broad enough to travel. It should apply across many situations, from the boardroom to the front line, not just one.
Specific enough to change behavior. Vague enough to mean anything means it changes nothing. The best commitments name something real.
Impossible to copy. If a competitor could paste it on their wall and no one would notice, it is too generic to be yours.
This is also why the language has to be drafted, tested, and refined rather than brainstormed. You start with the truth of what the organization needs, translate the emotion into a directive, test the phrase against real moments, and sharpen until it actually shapes thinking. For more on why this works at the level of thought, see how language creates culture.
Root Them in Your History
There is one move that strengthens core commitments more than almost any other, and most organizations miss it: tie the commitments to the company’s history and the era that built it. Nearly every mid-market and large company had a period of strong growth, usually led by founders or leaders who operated with a particular set of behaviors, ownership, urgency, candor, customer obsession, grit. That growth gear is almost always what the company is quietly trying to find again. It has scaled, added process and layers, and lost some of the edge that got it here. Naming the core commitments as how the founders and early leaders actually grew the company connects the behaviors you need now to the success the organization already reveres.
This is a kind of deliberate recontextualizing, and it is powerful precisely because it is mostly true. The behaviors that build companies are the same behaviors that show up in every founding story, because you cannot grow from nothing without ownership, curiosity, candor, and relentless drive. By asserting that the core commitments are a return to how the company won when it was at its best, you turn culture change from something new and imposed into something the organization is reaching for anyway. People resist a new program. They embrace getting their best self back. The most resonant framing is almost never this is new. It is this is the gear that built us, and it is how we win again.
Think back to your company’s strongest growth era. What behaviors drove it, and which of them have faded as you scaled? Those are often exactly the core commitments you need to name and reclaim.
Designing Is the Start. Making It Stick Is the Next Craft.
Designing core commitments well is a sequence: choose the key behaviors your strategy most demands from the universal palette, draft a strawman from the real language and philosophies your leaders already live, wordsmith it with the executive team and the CEO first, craft language that is directive and unmistakably yours, deepen each commitment with sub-commitments, and root the whole set in your growth history so it feels reclaimed rather than imposed. Do that, and you will have commitments your leaders own and your organization can be proud of.
But getting the language right is only half the battle. The best core commitments in the world do nothing if they stay on a slide. Making them stick is its own discipline: concentrating on a few commitments rather than diluting across many, cascading them through every team until enough people live them to tip the culture, embedding them in how you hire, coach, recognize, and decide, and modeling them relentlessly from the top. Design gives you the language. Implementation is how that language becomes the culture. It is the difference between a great set of commitments and a great culture.
With your core commitments designed, the next level of the architecture tailors the culture to the work of each function. Read next: Operating Commitments.
Work with Joe
Want a partner in designing your core commitments?
This is the process I run with leadership teams: immersing in the company, mining the philosophies and language your leaders already live, building the strawman, and iterating it one on one, CEO first, until the commitments are genuinely owned. It is creative, strategic, deeply collaborative work, and when it lands, it unlocks the potential of everyone in the organization.
If you are ready to design commitments your team will actually live, let’s build them.
See How Joe Works with Clients
Or email Joe directly at joe@stratechi.com
And follow Joe on LinkedIn for new content and insights.
Joe Newsum: McKinsey alum, former CEO, COO, CFO, and CMO, and creator of Culture by Commitment, working directly with Fortune 500 CEOs and executive teams to build cultures that hold.
Part of the Culture Guide
This is one piece of a complete, free guide to building a high performance culture. Start at the Culture Guide hub for the full system, or jump to the ideas most worth your time:
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Culture Strategy ›
The strategy: deriving the culture your business needs from your True North, your advantage, and the behaviors that win.
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Culture by Commitment ›
The method behind this page: how shared commitments, not values, actually build culture.
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What Is Organizational Culture ›
The big idea: it was never values, it was always language. Why most culture work fails.
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How Language Creates Culture ›
The mechanism: language shapes thinking, thinking shapes behavior, behavior becomes culture.
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The Four Types of Culture Commitments ›
The framework: the four kinds of commitments that build culture, and where meetings fit in.
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How to Make Culture Change Stick ›
The proof: concentrate, model, and reinforce until the new way holds on its own.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do you design core commitments?
Designing core commitments is a creative process, not a blank-page committee exercise. The most effective sequence is: gather the real inputs by interviewing executives, reviewing engagement survey data, and studying the company’s history; choose the key behaviors that matter most from the universal palette, weighted to your strategy; build a strawman, a strong first draft with headlines and language; then review and wordsmith with the full executive team, with the CEO going first. Starting from a strong draft produces sharp, committed language. Starting from a blank whiteboard produces generic mush.
Is there a universal set of core commitments to choose from?
There is no fixed universal list, but there is a universal palette of behaviors organizations draw from. Some are near-universal, like accountability, ownership, communication, collaboration, learning, and integrity, because almost every organization needs them. Others are tailored to what a company competes on, like creativity for a design firm, precision and safety for a hospital, or customer orientation for a frontline business. Universality lives in the palette. The specific commitments and their language are yours to craft.
How many core commitments should you design?
Most organizations land on four to seven. Fewer than four often fails to give enough guidance across the behaviors a culture needs. More than seven becomes hard for people to remember and live, which defeats the purpose. The discipline of a short list forces the prioritization that makes a culture coherent.
What makes good core commitment language?
Good commitment language is a directive, not a description. It is short enough to recall in the moment a hard situation arrives, emotionally resonant for that specific culture, broad enough to apply across many contexts, and specific enough to actually change behavior. The craft is taking a behavior from the universal palette and giving it language that is unmistakably yours, a phrase no competitor could paste on their own wall.
Who should be involved in designing core commitments?
The executive team owns the commitments, with the CEO setting the tone by going first. A strawman is best drafted by one or two people with a clear point of view, often with outside help, because committees average toward the safe and generic. But the refinement, the wordsmithing, and the final ownership must belong to the leadership team, because the commitments only get modeled and lived if the leaders made them their own.
Should core commitments come from company history?
Yes, where possible, and it is one of the most powerful moves available. Nearly every mid-market and large company had a strong growth era led by founders or leaders who operated with ownership, urgency, candor, and grit, and that gear is usually what the company is quietly trying to find again after scaling. Asserting that the core commitments are how the company grew when it was at its best turns culture change from something new and imposed into a return to the behaviors the organization already reveres. People resist a new program, but they embrace getting their best self back.