— Kent District Library
Four Years After Writing Down Its Culture, Staff Still Quote It.
Client Overview
Kent District Library (KDL) is the public library system for much of Kent County, Michigan. It runs 20 branches plus a Bookmobile and serves about 440,000 residents across 27 municipalities. Brian describes KDL as the largest, busiest library system in the state, with approximately 400 employees.
Brian Mortimore is KDL’s Director of Human Resources and Organizational Development. He has led HR at KDL for just over two decades, after organizational development work at a higher-education institution and HR work at a medical-education organization, both in Michigan. “I’m a Michigander through and through,” he says.
KDL has been a CultureWise client since 2022. Executive Director Lance Werner heard CultureWise founder David Friedman speak to his Vistage group in 2021, and Brian sponsored the project from there.
Why It Matters
For years Brian has worked to make KDL an employer of choice. He describes it as a three-legged stool: solid compensation, solid benefits, and solid culture. KDL wanted to be a place people seek out:
“Not simply a place where you have a job, not simply a place where you manage your career, but a place where you actually enjoy showing up to work each day knowing that you’re making a difference in your community.”
Brian Mortimore, Director of Human Resources and Organizational Development, Kent District Library
Pay and benefits come with numbers attached. Culture is harder to pin down. Brian points to sports coaches who talk about a culture of grit or a culture of winning. “And everyone seems to intuitively understand what it means, but nobody can really articulate it,” he says. He wanted a meaningful, valid way to define KDL’s culture so he could manage it on purpose.
The Challenge
KDL started from a good place. Brian describes the culture before CultureWise as “solid but undefined,” and the library had already put real work into it. The challenge was taking that work further.
- Values without defined behaviors. KDL had written down its values and what it aspired to be. Brian says that effort worked “to an extent.” The next step was naming the specific behaviors behind those values so people could act on them.
- One standard for a big, spread-out team. About 400 people work across 21 locations. A shared standard had to reach the whole team and mean the same thing at each branch.
- Drift. An organization can know itself and still slide away from that over time. “And if you start to drift from that, that’s a problem,” Brian says.
“Those are the times when you really need to be able to lean on a designed and intended culture.”
Kent District Library
Brian Mortimore
Director of Human Resources and Organizational Development
The Solution
KDL and CultureWise defined 27 Fundamentals: the specific behaviors that describe who KDL is and what it aspires to be. Brian kept the work group deliberate. Members of the leadership team, select managers, and a few people from outside those two groups contributed. With the help of the CultureWise team, that group put into words the 27 behaviors that define KDL.
Then Brian tested the list with about 30 managers (the full story is below). KDL named the finished set the KDL Way and printed it on KDL Way cards.
The rollout came on October 3, 2022, at a systemwide all-staff day. About 400 employees came together for breakout sessions led by the CultureWise team. “The CultureWise team was fantastic,” Brian says. He dropped in on several sessions and watched staff work through what each Fundamental meant to them:
“People are really engaging with one another around some behaviors that, while they might not be necessarily new to the organization, they’re now defined.”
— Brian Mortimore, Director of Human Resources and Organizational DevelopmentWhat KDL Runs Now
A Fundamental of the week. The whole system focuses on one Fundamental each week. Ask a KDL employee how they know the culture is good, Brian says, and they’ll name that week’s Fundamental and how the team attends to it.
A Monday Weekly Insight. Brian writes a Weekly Insight on the week’s Fundamental. It goes out to managers at 7 AM on Monday through the CultureWise software platform.
Daily reminders and coaching. Supervisors get daily reminders and coaching prompts on the week’s Fundamental.
KDL Way cards on day one. New hires get a KDL Way card, along with KDL hats and shirts, on their first day.
An all-staff day built around people. KDL built its all-staff day around information sharing, relationships, downtime, and peer-nominated staff awards. “At one time, people dreaded attending All-Staff, but now they are excited about it because our Fundamentals are front and center (i.e., taking our team members further, finding the fun, celebrating success),” Brian says.
“Did We Miss Anything?”
Brian knew the Fundamentals were right before the wider staff saw them.
After the work group finished the list, he took all 27 behaviors to the rest of KDL’s management team to explain what came next. He put them in a PowerPoint and walked about 30 managers through them. They sat nodding: that’s us, that feels like us. At the end of the meeting he asked the question that mattered. Did we miss anything?
The managers told him no. “Nope, you didn’t miss a thing.”
“And when you get through a management meeting where 30+ people all agree with the content, then you know you nailed it, right?”
— Brian Mortimore, Director of Human Resources and Organizational DevelopmentThat buy-in carried into the all-staff rollout and into the years since. KDL has kept the same list, and Brian sees value in that steadiness. Staff know what’s expected of them. The payoff shows up in hard stretches, when funding is tight or customers aren’t receiving you well.
The Results
Brian doesn’t credit one program for KDL’s results. “It all works together,” he says, and he compares a strong culture to a favorite chocolate chip cookie, the kind your mom or grandmother made:
“Either way, if you left one of those ingredients out, it wouldn’t be the same chocolate chip cookie, now would it?”
— Brian Mortimore, Director of Human Resources and Organizational DevelopmentFor him, culture sits at the center of the recipe. “Culture drives what we do,” he says. KDL is also recognized as a highly engaged workforce, per Gallup. In Brian’s words: “We are recognized as having a much larger, greater percentage of highly engaged employees in the workforce per Gallup, and culture contributes to all of that.”
A common language for culture. Before the KDL Way, people at KDL described the culture in different ways. “Now, there’s common language,” Brian says.
Fundamentals in hard conversations. When a tough topic comes up, staff reach for the Fundamentals to decide how to move forward. Brian hears lines like “we need to speak honestly about this because that is, after all, one of our Fundamentals,” and “we need to assume positive intent with our patrons.”
New hires know what success looks like. New hires read the KDL Way card and get it right away. “They understand this is the blueprint towards success at Kent District Library. They love that. And by having that blueprint for success, it takes a lot of anxiety away.”
KDL at a Glance
- 27 Fundamentals, in weekly practice since October 2022
- About 400 employees across 20 branches and a Bookmobile
- About 440,000 residents served across 27 municipalities
- Best and Brightest Employers to Work For, West Michigan and national
- Highly engaged workforce, per Gallup
From “solid but undefined” to “great.” Brian’s own read on the culture moved, and he hears the same from staff across the system.
A board that backs the work. When board members ask how KDL does what it does, Brian credits them first. Their support for the CultureWise implementation let KDL bring in the entire workforce. “You’ve supported us in that, and because of that support, we’re able to engage the entire workforce in this regard.”
Patrons notice the people. Patrons who have lived in several cities tell KDL it’s the best library system they’ve used. Brian credits the staff: “It’s a whole lot easier to buy a great collection of books than it is to foster a workforce that shows up every single day with such passion.” Brian adds: “We’re deliberate about who we hire, knowing they’ll need to embrace our Fundamentals. Once hired, we teach those Fundamentals, and throughout their employment life-cycle, they are reiterated again and again, be it through daily huddles or quarterly performance reviews.”
What’s Next at KDL
KDL recently moved to the new CultureWise software platform. One change saves Brian a step: the Weekly Insight now goes out on a set schedule, 7 AM Monday. “I used to have to indicate that each time. But now it’s there. So that’s easy.”
Next, Brian plans to sit down with a few managers and gather insights as to their use of the app, along with ideas on how to engage more team members as culture champions.
“We’re talking about having our managers identify a Fundamental each. And having them speak to it in a video and record that video so that it becomes part of ongoing engagement and training.”
— Brian Mortimore, Director of Human Resources and Organizational DevelopmentFour years in, Brian sums up why KDL manages culture on purpose: “It’s great to have hope. But it’s even better to have a plan.”
“Now, I feel like we have great culture. And I say that not only because I feel it, but because people reiterate that back to me on a regular basis from all different levels of the organization.”
— Brian Mortimore, Director of Human Resources and Organizational DevelopmentThe Culture You Need
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