HI, I'M MAREN.

Hard Truths About Sustaining Great Culture: The No Holds Barred Guide for Leaders Who Really Care 

Tuesday, April 7, 10:15 AM

Let's be honest—your organization earned recognition because your people said you don't suck as a workplace. That's actually harder to achieve than most leaders realize, and even harder to maintain when everything around you is falling apart. 

This isn't another feel-good session about company values and ping-pong tables. This is a real talk about what it actually takes to keep your culture intact when the world is on fire, your budgets are cut, AI is changing everything, and half your team is quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles. 

This interactive workshop is designed specifically for leaders of award-winning organizations who understand that yesterday's success doesn't guarantee tomorrow's resilience. Drawing from 15+ years of working with companies that actually care about their people—from scrappy startups to household names—plus the messy, humbling experience of building my own business through recessions, global pandemics, and every flavor of crisis you can imagine, we'll dig into the stuff nobody talks about in leadership books, we'll explore the delicate balance between preserving your core cultural values and adapting to forces beyond your control. 

What We'll Actually Talk About: 

• Why Good Intentions Aren't Enough: How operations, systems, and processes either support or sabotage your values (and why most leaders get this backwards) 

• The Authenticity Problem: When being "transparent" backfires, and how to communicate honestly without creating chaos 

• The Scale Trap: Why your 50-person startup culture doesn't just magically work at 500 people—and what to do before it all falls apart 

• Making Hard Choices: Real scenarios where doing right by your people conflicts with doing right by your business (spoiler: there are no easy answers) 

• The Trust Equation: How small operational decisions send big cultural messages—and why your employee handbook might be undermining everything you're trying to build 

How We'll Do This: 

• Real Talk Roundtables: Small groups tackling the messy scenarios you're actually facing (no theoretical BS) 

• The “Did That Just Happen?” Moments: Interactive exercises based on those 3am wake-up calls every leader has had 

• Systems Thinking: Map out how your daily operations either reinforce or undermine what you say you believe 

• Honest Assessments: Tools to figure out where your culture is actually strong vs. where you're just telling yourself a nice story 

• Action Planning That Actually Works: Leave with concrete next steps you can implement Monday morning 

Who Should Come: Leaders who are tired of surface-level culture conversations and ready to do the hard work. If you want to be told everything you're doing is great, this isn't your session. If you want to figure out how to build something that actually lasts, let's talk. 

What You'll Leave With: 

• A clear-eyed view of where your culture is actually strong vs. where you're fooling yourself 

• Practical ways to align your operations with your values (because misalignment kills trust faster than anything) 

• A communication playbook for the hard conversations you've been avoiding 

• Systems and processes that reinforce rather than undermine what you're trying to build 

• The confidence to make tough decisions while keeping your people's trust 

• A network of other leaders who get it and aren't afraid to tell you the truth 

The Bottom Line: Culture isn't about having the right words on your website—it's about having systems, processes, and daily operations that actually support the experience you want your people to have. Most leaders get this backwards, then wonder why their "great culture" feels fake to everyone who actually works there. 

This session is for leaders ready to close that gap.