HBR Paywalled the Article That Sparked The ECD, So We Wrote Our Own
The article that sparked a global movement is now behind a paywall. So we wrote our own.
Every workplace has an emotional culture
It's the unspoken norms about which emotions are encouraged, tolerated, or suppressed. It shapes how people show up, how they collaborate, and how they perform under pressure.
Most organisations focus on cognitive culture — values, beliefs, and ways of working. But emotional culture is just as powerful. It's what people feel when they're at work, and it influences everything from engagement to innovation to wellbeing.
The problem? Most leaders don't know how to see it, name it, or shape it.
Where this work began
In 2016, Sigal Barsade and Olivia O'Neill published "Manage Your Emotional Culture" in the Harvard Business Review. It was a landmark piece — the first time emotional culture had been named and framed as something leaders could actively design.
That article sparked everything we do at riders&elephants.
We originally designed The Emotional Culture Deck as a simple, powerful tool to help teams create the emotional culture they wish they had. Since then, it's become so much more than a deck of cards. We've trained thousands of practitioners around the world to facilitate emotional culture conversations in organisations of all shapes & sizes in 80+ countries and 14 different languages.
Why we wrote our own guide
Earlier this year, HBR locked "Manage Your Emotional Culture" behind a paywall.
So we created our own version, inspired by the original research, grounded in the work thousands of our practitioners & partners have been doing every day with teams for 10 years now.
If you're a facilitator, coach, consultant, or leader who wants to share why emotional culture matters — this is for you.
Download the guide
A Practical Guide to Managing Your Emotional Culture
This one's in our tone. Bold, human, challenger. Made for facilitators, leaders, coaches, and anyone who wants to share why emotional culture matters in an accessible and easier-to-digest form.
Our mission
At riders&elephants, we believe the workplace can be more human.
And emotions are the most human part of work. But the most ignored.
So we start where others don't. With emotion.
We help organisations manage & move the emotions of their people, their customers, and through every change and challenge. Then we measure what shifts.
We're proving that emotional culture unlocks better performance, deeper connection, and more meaningful work.
The Emotional Culture Deck is your first step on that journey.
Try The Emotional Culture Deck for yourself
Want to experience the tool that's helping thousands of organisations & hundreds of thousands of individuals have conversations about what matters?
Download the full ECD PDF... for free.
No catch. No paywall. This is the entire PDF of our core tool in our emotional culture system, removing all barriers for anyone in the world to have f-word conversations about what matters to them. All we ask in return is that you share this page, or our free download page & the deck with someone that matters to you so we can keep paying it forward for generations to come.
Download The Emotional Culture Deck PDF here
You can still access the original HBR article as a subscriber or purchase it here.
Over 500,000+ people in 70+ countries look to our systems to flip performance & culture. People use our system in some of the biggest & most inspiring organisations on the planet.
