Building a High-Performance Culture: The Framework, SMART Goals, and Agenda Templates for Meetings Your Startup Needs
- Carl Stanton
- Oct 23
- 7 min read
Table of Contents
Is Your Company Culture Working For You, Or Against You?
Here's a reality most startup founders discover too late in 2025: company culture doesn't form by accident. It's developing right now, whether you're actively shaping it or not. The only question is whether you're designing it intentionally or letting it happen by default.
In fast-growing startups, culture becomes the invisible force that either accelerates growth or creates friction at every turn. It affects how fast you hire, how well teams execute, and whether your top performers stay or leave. According to recent industry research, companies with strong organizational culture see 72% higher employee engagement and 40% lower turnover rates.
The Real Cost of Culture by Default: Unproductive Meetings and Misalignment
Many founders focus exclusively on product-market fit, revenue growth, and fundraising, assuming culture will work itself out naturally. By the time they notice the cracks, they're already paying a steep price:
Misaligned decisions that completely ignore company priorities and strategic direction
Endless, unproductive meetings with no clear format for meeting agenda or actionable follow-up
High turnover and slow hiring that drains resources and momentum
Inconsistent execution across teams, with different standards and approaches
Communication breakdowns that require constant firefighting
The irony? These founders are working harder than ever but moving slower. Culture by default acts as a hidden tax on performance, costing companies an estimated 20-30% of their potential productivity.
Without a standardised agenda for meeting template or clear operating principles, teams waste hours in unfocused discussions that lead nowhere. Decisions get revisited, priorities shift without notice, and nobody knows what success actually looks like.
What Is a Culture Operating System?
A Culture Operating System (CORE OS™) is a structured framework that allows you to intentionally design, implement, and maintain the company culture your startup needs to thrive.
It's not about perks, bean bags, or ping-pong tables, it's about creating genuine clarity, accountability, and team alignment. Built by operators who've scaled startups themselves, this system replaces vague culture ideals with repeatable rhythms, practical templates, and measurable progress.
Think of it as the operating system for how your company actually works—the principles, rituals, and practices that determine whether your culture accelerates or hinders growth.
The Four Pillars of Intentional Culture
1. Define Your Values Using SMART Goals Definition
Your company values should act like decision-making filters, not decorative wall art or empty slogans. When done right, they help your team make better calls faster, especially when leadership isn't in the room.
Apply the SMART goals definition framework to your values:
Specific: Define clear behaviours, not buzzwords like "innovation" or "excellence"
Measurable: Track how often those behaviours actually show up in daily work
Achievable: Set expectations people can realistically live by
Relevant: Tie them directly to your mission and business objectives
Time-bound: Review and reinforce them regularly through consistent rituals
Generic values like "integrity" or "teamwork" don't drive behaviour change. SMART, actionable values with concrete examples do. For instance, instead of "customer-focused," try "We respond to customer inquiries within 2 hours and proactively share product updates."
2. Embed Operating Principles Into Daily Work
Operating principles turn abstract values into daily practice. They answer critical questions that come up repeatedly:
How do we run effective meetings?
What's our standard agenda template for meeting preparation, structure, and follow-up?
How do we give constructive feedback and hold each other accountable?
What does "good communication" actually look like here?
How do we make decisions when there's disagreement?
Codify these principles in a shared culture playbook so everyone, especially new hires, understands "how things work around here." This documentation becomes your scaling blueprint, ensuring consistency as you grow from 5 to 50 team members.
3. Build Rituals That Stick and Drive Performance
Rituals are how culture lives and breathes day to day. This includes everything from your weekly team sync using a structured meeting agenda format to your quarterly planning sessions and Friday wins celebrations.
The right agenda for meeting template ensures every session has:
Clear objectives stated upfront
Defined roles (facilitator, note-taker, timekeeper)
Metrics review and scorecard updates
Issue identification and resolution
Action items with owners and deadlines
Documented outcomes shared within 24 hours
Productive rituals create rhythm and predictability, helping teams operate efficiently while staying connected to purpose. They transform meetings from time sinks into strategic alignment sessions.
4. Measure What Matters: Culture Metrics and Diagnostics
Culture isn't soft or subjective, it's measurable. The best culture systems use regular diagnostics and employee surveys to understand where culture is thriving or lagging.
Track metrics like:
Employee engagement scores
Turnover rates by department
Time-to-hire for key positions
Meeting efficiency ratings
Cross-team collaboration frequency
Values demonstration in peer reviews
When you track what matters, you transform gut feelings into actionable insight and data-driven culture improvements.
Real-World Example: How Mina Digital Transformed Meetings and Alignment
In the last business Chris co-founded, Mina Digital Ltd, before implementing a structured culture operating system, Mina struggled with the same challenges most early-stage companies face.
The Problem: We had a messy set of meetings with no consistent structure. Different departments operated in silos. Senior leaders lacked visibility into what was actually happening across teams. We had no shared understanding of progress toward our quarterly targets, annual goals, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG).
The Solution: We implemented what we now call the C90 meeting format - our startup-adapted version inspired by the EOS L10 meeting structure but specifically designed for the speed and agility startups require.
The C90 Meeting Format for Meeting Success:
Our agenda for meeting template included:
Good news (5 mins): Quick round the room to get everyone in a positive mindset.
Headlines (5 Mins): shared beforehand and walked through by each department head. No interruptions but flags if need to raise an issue for discussion.
Scorecard Review (10 mins): Weekly metrics that drive the business - from sick days to feature deployments.
OKR Review (5 mins): Progress on quarterly priorities
To-Do List (5 mins): Review previous week's commitments
Review issues (5 mins): Automated scoring to prioritise issues rating 1-5 on urgency and importance.
Issues List (50 mins): Issue processing the most important issues in priority order. (if we don't get through them all - get pushed back to next week.)
Conclude (5 mins): Recap decisions, assignments, cascading messages, rate the meeting.
The Results:
Within 90 days of implementing this structured format for meeting and operating rhythm:
Complete departmental visibility: Senior leaders could see exactly what was happening across all teams
Unified team alignment: Everyone understood where we stood against quarterly targets, annual goals, and our BHAG
Measurable performance: We tracked everything that drove business results, from operational metrics to strategic initiatives
Faster decision-making: Issues were identified and resolved in real-time rather than festering
Higher accountability: Clear action items with owners eliminated the "I thought someone else was handling it" problem
The C90 became our heartbeat, the regular rhythm that kept the entire organisation synchronised and moving forward together. It transformed our meeting culture from chaotic and reactive to structured and strategic.
Why Startups Need a Different Approach to Culture and Goal-Setting
Corporate culture frameworks consistently fail in startup environments because they're too slow, too bureaucratic, and designed for organisations with fundamentally different challenges. Fortune 500 companies optimise for stability; startups optimise for speed and adaptation.
Founders need culture systems and meeting structures that prioritize:
Speed: Make decisions and execute fast without getting bogged down in bureaucracy
Clarity: Use clear meeting agenda formats and SMART goal frameworks to maintain alignment
Accountability: Everyone owns outcomes and results, not just tasks and activities
Adaptability: Culture and processes evolve as you grow from 10 to 100+ employees
Measurability: Track what actually drives business performance, not vanity metrics
With a purpose-built culture operating system, you create an environment where people execute without micromanagement, communication flows naturally, and progress compounds week after week.
The best startup cultures balance structure with flexibility, enough framework to maintain alignment, enough freedom to move quickly and experiment.
Getting Started: Building Your Culture Using SMART Goals Definition
Step 1: Assess Your Current Culture
Start with an honest culture assessment to understand where you are today. Identify your existing strengths, critical gaps, and biggest opportunities for improvement.
Take the Culture Calculator to receive a detailed scorecard showing how your company culture stacks up across key dimensions like clarity, accountability, alignment, and team engagement.
Step 2: Define Your Core Values with SMART Criteria
Don't settle for generic values. Use the SMART goals definition framework to craft values that actually drive behaviour:
Write 3-5 core values that are specific and memorable
Define 2-3 concrete behaviours for each value
Create real-world examples (both positive and negative)
Make them measurable through observable actions
Review and reinforce them monthly in team meetings
Step 3: Create Your Operating Principles Playbook
Document the answers to your most frequently asked questions about "how we work here." This becomes your culture playbook that scales with you.
Include your agenda template for meeting and standard format for meeting facilitation. When everyone knows the structure, meetings become dramatically more efficient and effective.
Step 4: Implement Weekly Rituals and Rhythms
Start with one foundational ritual, ideally a weekly leadership meeting using a structured agenda. Our C90 format works brilliantly, but the specific framework matters less than consistency and follow-through.
Your agenda for meeting template should always include:
Scorecard/metrics review
Progress on quarterly priorities
Issue identification and resolution
Clear action items with owners
Step 5: Measure, Iterate, and Improve
Culture development is never "done." Measure progress quarterly using:
Employee engagement surveys
Culture scorecard assessments
Meeting effectiveness ratings
Goal achievement percentages
Turnover and hiring metrics
Use this data to continuously refine your approach and double down on what's working.
The Bottom Line: Culture Is Your Competitive Advantage
Your company culture is forming right now, whether you're actively shaping it or not. The question isn't whether you'll have a culture, you already do. The question is whether it's intentional, measurable, and aligned with your business objectives.
Strong startup culture isn't about perks or feel-good initiatives. It's about clear goals defined using SMART frameworks, focused meetings driven by effective agenda for meeting template structures, and consistent follow-through on what matters most. It's about building a repeatable format for meeting that drives action, reinforces accountability, and creates the alignment needed to scale rapidly.
For founders ready to scale with intention rather than chaos, a structured Culture Operating System provides the practical tools and frameworks to turn culture from a vague aspiration into a genuine competitive advantage. When your culture works for you instead of against you, everything else becomes easier, hiring, execution, decision-making, and growth.
Ready to Transform Your Startup Culture?
Take the Culture Calculator today to receive your personalized culture scorecard. Discover exactly where your culture is strong, identify critical gaps, and get specific recommendations for building the high-performance culture your startup needs to scale successfully.
Stop letting culture happen by default. Start designing it with intention.
CORE OS™ is a proven framework built by operators who've scaled startups from early stage to rapid growth. Learn more about how we can help you codify the culture you need at The Business Trove.
