What Ellen Will Knows About Team Culture That Most Leaders Don't
A conversation about connection before content, the soft open, and why “open to outcome” is the rarest leadership skill in any organization.
📍 If You Only Read This Far
The lines worth underlining before you read the rest:
Should I really start every meeting with chitchat?
“You can tell who has done connection before content and who hasn’t just by sort of the affect of the people sitting at the table.”
Why do my values posters never stick?
“You need some kind of little way of reminding them of why they’re there. You need like a gimmick.” (Ellen’s mom. Yes, really.)
How do I get someone to actually try a new idea?
“At this point in my career, I am more interested in helping other people figure those things out for themselves than I am in holding on to ‘this is the way we do it because I know this is the best way.’”
What’s the one thing you’d leave a leader with?
“Connection before content. When people feel valued and heard, they’re more likely to want to be there.”
👋 A Note from Chris
I met Ellen Will at a workshop I was running. Within about ten minutes I knew I wanted to talk to her on the show. She does something almost nobody does well. She notices what’s happening in her own body, names it accurately, and uses that information to lead a room.
Ellen runs Outdoor School at Shaver’s Creek. The program has been bringing fifth graders into the woods of central Pennsylvania since the 1950s. Seventy years of the same trails, the same lodge, the same general routine, run by a fresh batch of college-age counselors every semester. That kind of longevity in any program is rare. In a program that depends on volunteer-grade student labor, it’s almost unheard of.
We recorded this episode while a snowstorm raged outside her window in Happy Valley. Power somehow held. The conversation turned out to be exactly about that: how culture stays standing when conditions change.
If you run a center, lead a team, or train people who are paid less than they deserve to do work that actually matters, this one is for you.
— Chris
🤝 Why do most teams skip the connection before the content?
Because they don’t think they have time.
The phrase comes from Will Wise, a colleague Ellen worked with for years. The rule is simple: connect with people as people before launching into the agenda. Ellen says she can literally see the difference in a room.
“You can tell who has done connection before content and who hasn’t just by sort of the affect of the people sitting at the table.”
The reason most leaders skip it is the math.
“Is there time to do that? No, I’ve got three hours and I have to get through all of this stuff. But if you don’t make time to do that, then it’s just checking boxes and it feels transactional.”
Transactional is the right word. Most meetings are designed to move information from one head to another, and connection feels like the thing slowing the meeting down. The meeting is slow because nobody in the room has decided yet whether they’re willing to participate.
The mechanic Ellen uses comes from Mark Collard at Playmeo. She calls it a soft open: something to do as people walk in that’s optional, low-stakes, and not the meeting itself.
A word search with the names of the people in the room. A small game two students designed for the day. Sometimes nothing more than coffee and one question on a whiteboard. The rule is that participation is optional and the energy is low.
What it produces is participation that’s already underway by the time the meeting officially starts. People are talking to each other instead of staring at their phones. The room is warm. The first agenda item isn’t fighting against silence.
That’s the whole move. Five minutes of “wasted” time at the front, recovered tenfold across the rest of the session.
This is Be / Do / Feel working in the FEEL layer. Connection-before-content is a felt sense that the room is on. You can see it on people’s faces. You can train yourself to see it before the meeting starts.
🌟 How do you onboard someone in a way that makes them want to stay?
Ask them what they’re good at. Then actually use the answer.
Ellen’s first questions to a new staff member are not what you’d expect.
“What are you good at? What’s the strength that you bring to the group?”
She asks 18-year-old first-year students this, and they often say I don’t have any experience. Ellen’s response: Well, you’ve lived for 18 years. You’re good at something.
The second question is the one most onboarding programs skip: What do you want to work on?
This is strengths-based onboarding in plain English. Most onboarding is compliance-based. Here are the rules. Here’s the schedule. Here are the things we expect you to do. Strengths-based onboarding starts from the assumption that the person walking in already brings something, and the leader’s job is to find it.
A student wrote in her end-of-week reflection that the thing that made her group successful was that her learning group leader asked them what they were good at, and then let them use those skills during the week. When she was struggling with the thing she wasn’t good at, she could look across the cabin and find someone who was. It worked because someone had done two minutes of asking on day one.
The second move is cohort building. Ellen waited years to add a Thursday-night meet-and-greet the day before a new cohort arrived for their week. She was worried about asking too much of students.
“After we did it the first time, I was like, why did I wait so long to do that? Because this is beautiful and everybody loves it. It made people 50 percent more comfortable with each other when they show up on the first day.”
Fifty percent. That’s a real number from a program leader who’s been doing this for fifteen years. Most onboarding programs would kill for a 50% comfort lift on day one. The price was one extra evening, structured as come hang out before it gets serious.
🌱 What’s the difference between feedback and feed-forward?
Feedback points backward. Feed-forward points to where the person is trying to get.
A graduate student in Ellen’s class made a small reframe a few years ago that’s been quietly running in the background ever since.
“She said, let’s call it feed forward, because really we’re trying to move you forward. You’re here and we’re trying to get you here.”
Ellen knows it sounds cheesy. She admits it. But the reframe shifts how the receiver sits in the chair.
Feedback points backward, like a report card on what already happened. Feed-forward points forward, like fuel for what comes next. When you feed something, it grows.
In practice this means the person delivering input doesn’t lead with what went wrong. They lead with where the receiver is trying to get to, and then offer the input as a way to close the gap. Have you thought about what would happen if… Compare your reflection questions to your learning objectives. If they’re not in line, the campers won’t be able to answer them.
Same input. Different chair to receive it in.
This is also the mechanic that makes feedback survivable for people who have been told their whole career that feedback is something that happens to them. Most ECE staff have received plenty of feedback. Most of it has been the report-card kind. The defensiveness that shows up in the meeting where you try to “give honest feedback” is a learned response to a specific frame.
Change the frame and the response changes.
This is one of the cheapest reframes in leadership. It costs zero dollars and about three seconds of cognitive effort. The grad student who said it didn’t publish a paper or trademark a methodology around it. She just said it once in a class. Ellen kept using it.
That’s about the best ROI on a single sentence I’ve ever heard.
🚪 Why does “open to outcome” beat “we’ve always done it this way”?
Because the cost of “we’ve always done it this way” isn’t the failed idea. It’s the people who slowly stop bringing ideas.
The phrase came from a snowstorm. Ellen was in Boston with Corky Potter, the founding director of Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center. They were supposed to drive a 15-passenger van back to New Hampshire. The storm closed the roads. Ellen would have been the one driving. She panicked.
Corky said: Be open to outcome. We’ll figure it out.
The phrase stuck. Twenty-some years later it’s still her operating principle.
In leadership terms, “open to outcome” is the willingness to honor what’s worked before and let new information reshape it. Most leaders pick one. The traditionalists say this is how we do it here. The disrupters say that’s not how we do it anymore. Ellen does something more useful.
“At this point in my career, I am more interested in helping other people figure those things out for themselves than I am in holding on to this is the way we do it because I know this is the best way.”
When a new program assistant arrives with an idea Ellen has tried and watched fail, her current move is let me let you try it anyway. They get to learn the lesson themselves. The team gets to be wrong together. Sometimes the new person finds an angle Ellen missed, and the whole program improves.
This is Be / Do / Feel working in the BE layer. The orientation a leader holds, before the move they make and before the radar they read. Open to outcome is the BE.
There’s a kindred move Ellen describes about kid behavior: behavior is communication, and you’re not going to reach every kid. Sometimes the kid will join when they’re ready. Sometimes they won’t. The leader’s job is to do what they can and then let go. That’s the same orientation, pointed at outcomes you can’t control.
Holding on costs more than it looks like it does. Ellen has been at this long enough to know which cost is the one that ends a culture.
📋 How do you make values stick beyond the poster on the wall?
Put them on the evaluation, not just the wall.
A poster of values is the cheapest leadership move there is. Welcome to Wells Fargo. Respect, integrity, customer focus.
Most are decorative.
Ellen’s CAMPERS values came from the Friday she went home convinced something had broken. A whole batch of counselors had checked out that week. One of them fell asleep against a wall while a lesson was happening around him. Ellen called her mom, who is apparently the wisest person at Penn State.
“She said: you need some kind of little way of reminding them of why they’re there. You need like a gimmick.”
Over the weekend, Ellen and her co-director worked through what kind of gimmick they could build. They landed on seven values whose first letters spell CAMPERS:
- Community
- Aha moments
- Magic
- Positive outdoor experiences
- Engagement
- Respect
- Safety
Every Monday afternoon, new staff sit in small groups with one word at a time. What does this word mean to you? What does it look like at camp? What’s your role in making it happen? Then they shuffle groups. Then Ellen puts the seven letters on a dry-erase board, scrambled, and runs the room like a Wordle puzzle until somebody unscrambles them.
That’s the part that’s fun. The part that makes the values stick is what happens next.
The CAMPERS values appear on the dining-hall poster. They also appear on every end-of-week evaluation. Each learning group leader rates each counselor on each value: did they show up engaged, did they respect the campers, did they help build community. The poster names the values. The evaluation enforces them.
That accountability layer is what most “values posters” never get. The poster says what we care about. The evaluation says we’re going to look at whether you actually did it. Together they make a culture. Apart they make decoration.
☀️ What does this mean for your practice on Monday morning?
Ellen Will runs a 70-year-old program that people drive back to volunteer at after they’ve graduated. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the program runs five small mechanics, repeated, until the mechanics become the culture.
Try one of these this week:
- Soft open the meeting. Five minutes. Optional. Low-stakes. Coffee and one question on a whiteboard before the agenda starts.
- Lead with strengths. Ask one new staff member what they’re good at and what they want to work on. Then actually use the answer this week.
- Feed forward, once. Replace “feedback” with “feed-forward” in your next 1:1. Watch what happens to the receiver’s posture.
- Say “let’s try it.” The next time someone brings you an idea you’ve already tried and watched fail, let them try it anyway. Watch them work.
- Values on the evaluation. Pull your values off the poster and onto your weekly review. If they’re not on the evaluation, they’re decoration.
Connection before content. Strengths first. Forward, not back. Open to outcome. Values that show up twice.
Ellen’s nature name at Outdoor School is Xylem. The cells that bring water from a plant’s roots to its leaves so the plant can do its job. The leaders who build cultures that last seventy years are the ones who quietly carry resources to the people doing the actual work.
A storm was raging outside her window the day we recorded. Power somehow held. The mechanics she described in that conversation are the same mechanics that let a 70-year-old program keep running when conditions change. They take seconds. They cost nothing. They are also the easiest things in the world to skip.
Don’t.
Listen to the full conversation with Ellen Will above, including stories about nature names, the Tim Mateer dissertation on outdoor school identity, and how Ellen’s co-director redesigned the last morning of camp after being told “I don’t know if fifth graders can do this.”
Want one mechanic like this every other week?
If you run a team where retention matters and “culture” is the word you use when you mean the way it feels to work here, my newsletter sends one short, useful piece every other week. Usually with a single move you can run on Monday.
Subscribe to the Newsletter Work With Chris📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Ellen Will. Associate Director, Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center, Penn State. Outdoor School Program Director.
- Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center. Penn State’s nature center, founded in 1976.
- Outdoor School at Shaver’s Creek. Residential outdoor education program for fifth graders, in operation since the 1950s.
- Wise, W., & Littlefield, C. Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter. Source for the “connection before content” framing.
- Mark Collard at Playmeo. Origin of the “soft open” concept Ellen uses in her training class.
- Corky Potter. Profile and retirement archive, The Daily Collegian. Founding director of Shaver’s Creek (1976 to 2002); origin of “Be open to outcome.”
- Mateer, T. J. Penn State doctoral dissertation, eTD Library. Identity, environmental behavior, and outdoor education at Shaver’s Creek.
