Case Study 02 · People Development & Culture Design
The best culture work I've ever done wasn't in my job description — and it's still running without me.
Overview — For Skimmers
When I moved into an advisory role supporting Fannie Mae's Chief Marketing Office, I found a people problem nobody had been able to solve: inconsistent management standards, ad hoc mentorship, and new managers being promoted without development support. Nobody asked me to fix it. I founded the Marketing People Council anyway — a leadership-driven culture taskforce built from the inside out. The work was eventually adopted by HR and scaled enterprise-wide. The programs outlasted my tenure in the role. That's the only metric for culture work that actually matters.
The Situation
When I moved into an advisory role supporting the Chief Marketing Office, the Marketing and Communications division had a people problem that nobody had been able to solve. Management standards were inconsistent. Mentorship was ad hoc. New managers were being promoted without development support. The team was producing good work, but the culture underneath it was fraying — and senior leadership knew it.
Nobody had formally asked me to fix it. But it was clearly the most important unfilled need in the organization, and I had both the skills and the access to do something about it.
The Approach
I founded the Marketing People Council — a leadership-driven culture taskforce designed to address the problems from inside the organization rather than from above it. The instinct was deliberate: culture change imposed from the top tends to be resisted. Culture change built by the people living inside it tends to stick.
The council tackled management standards, mentorship infrastructure, onboarding consistency, and employee development programming. We built from scratch, iterating quickly and staying close to what people actually needed rather than what looked good in a presentation.
In parallel, I developed a team identity program — custom player cards for every member of the team, modeled loosely on baseball cards, capturing each person's role, skills, and the human details behind the work. Who they were, not just what they did. It sounds simple. The impact was not. It changed how people saw each other across functions and gave the team a shared language for its own diversity of expertise and personality.
The Outcome
The Marketing People Council's work was adopted by HR and scaled enterprise-wide — well beyond the marketing division it was built for. The manager development programs and minimum learning standards we established became embedded in company-wide HR practices. The work outlasted my time in the role, which is the only metric for culture work that actually matters.
I didn't have the title for this work. Leaders kept asking me to do it because it needed to be done and because I was the person who knew how. That pattern — being pulled toward the most important people problem in the room regardless of the org chart — has defined my career more than any title has.
Culture work is only real if it runs without you. Build for that from day one.