Putting Our Culture into Words

Back in August, I wrote a blog post about how proud I am of the culture we’ve built at MCUL and CUSG. Our team survey results showed that team members not only like where they work, but feel they can be their authentic selves here. That’s something I take great pride in. But after sitting with those results, I found myself asking, Okay, what comes next? What do you do as a leader when you already have a great culture?

For me, the answer was to put it into words.

Late last month, we held an evening of celebration, bringing together nearly every team member from MCUL and CUSG for dinner and an awards ceremony. The night was filled with conversation, laughter and connection with both familiar faces we’ve known for years and new team members we were able to welcome in person.

During the event, I had the chance to introduce something that’s been in the works for a while: our Culture Code handbook. This was a collaborative project built to express the shared values of our organization. We call it CARE, or Curiosity, Accountability, Respect and Excellence.

The goal with this wasn’t to add something new, but to capture what already makes our culture special. These values are things our team lives every day, in the way we treat one another and serve credit unions, and putting them into words just gives us a clearer way to talk about who we are. Starting with 2026, the CARE code will be part of every team member’s review process and goals as a way to emphasize its importance, as well as set it up for discussion between team members and their leaders. Our handbook will not only spell out how benefits and PTO work, it will also show new folks how important it is to us that people show up with these principles top of mind.

For me personally, I’ve often been asked by peers outside Michigan what our organization stands for, and I finally have a clear way to describe it. And more importantly, this handbook reinforces something that I’ve learned as a leader: people do their best work when they know what their organization stands for.

That’s what the Culture Code does: it gives language to what we’ve built and how we’ll keep growing together. I believe having a defined framework like this is key to nurturing an organization’s culture, because it gives team members tangible reference points and expectations — not only for what I expect, but for what each of us expect from one another.

As we were building out this handbook, I remembered an article that my friend Jill Nowacki, President/CEO of Humanidei, wrote this past summer titled “Want to be perfect? Or Better?” In the piece, Jill wrote about how chasing perfection can hold us back from actually improving. The idea was that “perfection” is a mirage, something unattainable, while embracing a “growth mindset” is recognizing that we always have room to improve. That perspective really resonated with me, and it’s something we talked about while introducing the Culture Code: the expectation isn’t perfection. And even though our team’s culture was already really strong, that doesn’t mean there’s no room to keep improving it.

That’s something I think every leader can take to heart. Whether you’re leading a credit union, a department or a small team, culture isn’t something you set and forget. It’s something you define and grow with intention.

For us, we’re doing that with the Culture Code, which is both a reflection of who we are at MCUL and CUSG and a promise for how we’ll continue doing our part to strengthen the entire Michigan credit union community.

Thanks for reading.

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