Fast-Track Emotional Culture Crafting in 6 Weeks | Amazon Pilot Programme Results

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Inside the 6-Week Emotional Culture Pilot Programme

We recently wrapped up an Emotional Culture pilot programme that shows real, tangible results of a brand-new team crafting their emotional culture…fast!

When this leader returned from parental leave early this year, she inherited a brand-new team spread across three continents. The team had:

Zero shared history – members came from three different predecessor groups.
Tight delivery deadlines – first programmes for AMET, APAC & LATAM due in eight weeks.
Lean head count – each person owned the workload of ~3 peers in North America teams.
No face-to-face cadence – 11-hour time-zone swing made quick trust-building hard.

Rather than run a standard “ways-of-working” session, Susannah chose The Emotional Culture Deck to surface the feelings that would fuel the mission (Connected, Rebellious, Valued & Seen) and those that could stall it (Paralysed, Overwhelmed, Incapable).

The Goal: Prove that one immersive emotional culture workshop plus six micro-rituals could hard-wire psychological safety and idea-sharing before operational pressure peaked.

That hypothesis is what you’ll see borne out in the results below and in the 1-page summary.

The pilot programme

This wasn’t a theoretical experiment. It was a real-world test inside one of Amazon’s fast-moving product teams spread across three continents, under pressure to deliver. The goal was simple: could a structured emotional rhythm help a brand-new team connect, collaborate and perform under pressure? The programme incuded:

One ECD Team‑Formation workshop to map the emotions they wanted (and didn’t want to feel as a team and what they wanted their stakeholders to feel and not feel).
Six weekly “retro” check‑ins (Plus weekly tracker + tiny behaviour experiment).
Pre & post‑survey collaboration with Professor Michael Parke (Wharton Business School).

How we measured impact

We partnered with Professor Michael Parke from Wharton Business School to design pre- and post-surveys that measured the emotional shifts this programme created. His expertise helped ensure the results were credible, rigorous, and practical. Not just feel-good.

The Pilot results: What moved in just 42 days.

In just six weeks, this team saw measurable shifts in psychological safety, emotional openness, and collaboration without extra headcount, budget, or face-to-face time.

Metric | % Shift | Why it matters

Psychological safety | ↑ 20 % | True feelings now surface quickly
Employee voice | ↑ 12 % | More ideas + fixes crossing borders.
Positive emotions |↑ 12 % | Resilience under tight deadlines.
Leader emotional support | ↑ 7 % | Trust & retention booster.
‘Stress emotions’ (Paralysed, Overwhelmed, Incapable) | ↓ 25–30 % | Head‑space freed for higher‑value work.

Weekly ECD Tracker highlights:

Each week, the team completed a short self-reflection using the ECD Tracker. A simple tool that helps surface how teams are actually feeling at work. It wasn’t a survey for survey’s sake. It was a weekly rhythm designed to build awareness, foster emotional openness, and spot patterns early.

Each weekly tracker focused on:

How people were feeling most strongly that week
Which emotions were supporting or stalling progress
One behaviour or moment that shaped their week

Over time, this rhythm became a pulse check for the emotional health of the team. Here’s what stood out:

Rebellious (+62 %) – surge in healthy challenge & innovation.
Connected (+27 %) – deeper bonds across time zones.
Valued & Seen (+20 %) – motivation & recognition lift.

Why we feel so inspired

Because the results weren’t driven by a big-bang intervention or a lavish budget, they came from tiny, repeatable acts:

One kick-off emotional culture workshop to map success emotions and derailers.
Six weekly “micro-rituals” (10-minute retro + Weekly tracker).
Leader as role-model. Susannah kicked off every stand-up by labelling her feelings, making emotional openness “just how we start work here.”
Action-learning loop. Each week, the team chose a single behaviour experiment (ask for help once, recognise one peer, say “I’m worried about…”) and reviewed its impact the next week.
Built for constraints. No extra headcount, three time zones, and back-to-back programme deadlines.

The takeaway? Consistency beats scale.

When a leader embodies the culture and the team practices small emotional habits every week, double-digit gains in safety, voice and positivity can appear in barely six weeks, even inside Amazon’s pace-and-pressure environment.

One final note.

We know big results can happen fast. But lasting change takes continued practice. The real challenge now is maintaining the momentum. We’ll be coming back to this team in the months ahead to measure ongoing progress and keep learning. Watch this space we’re continuing to build the tools, trackers, and programmes that help leaders stay consistent in the emotional side of culture.

Want to learn how to lead this kind of shift yourself?

If you’d like to explore the tools, workshops, and structure behind this six-week Emotional Culture Programme, you can enrol in the Emotional Stakeholder Engagement Course today.

Gain the tools and confidence to deliver this programme with your own teams or clients, right away.

→Click here to enrol now

See for yourself why The Emotional Culture Deck is changing how people and teams master their emotions.

Download our free ECD PDF version. It's a simple, no-obligation way to cut and care.

Click here → https://www.ridersandelephants.com/the-emotional-culture-deck-pdf-download

The Deck, the whole Deck and nothing but the Deck. Our free Emotional Culture Deck PDF version includes everything you’d get in the physical Deck.

All the cards. All the emotions. All the simplicity. All you need to bring it to life is a printer and a pair of scissors.

Download. Print out. Cut up & Play.