Reddit reviews The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

I honestly think any kind of customer service. That is where I was able to develop a lot of soft skills. Volunteering for a nonprofit thrift shop or something like that would give you a good start and would be minimal hours.

In addition, taking on a leadership role in anything (a local chapter of rotary, etc.) can be very good experience.

That being said, a certain amount of soft skills will have to do with personality type and personal motivation. I was personally motivated to go out of my way to attain leadership positions throughout my high school and college years and have been overall successful with it.

One book I see recommended a lot is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie has a lot of other books as well that pertain to your interests.

Also, my work has a special obsession with The Checklist Manifesto and The Advantage. The equity firm that owns my company requires all managers and higher ups to read those two books, so obviously they've got something going for them!

Culture is a very broad term. So the approach that my current company took 2 years ago was to take some time to think about what were the actual values and habits that we wanted to preserve. by "take some time" I mean that a few different people from sales, engineering, support, marketing, and operations met regularly with the CEO and talked things out and refined language. I wasn't in this group but talked with folks who were. I recommended the book The Advantage ^(and I still do). This resulted in a statement of 4 values, a phrase with some explanation of what it meant in a day-to-day context and how it might guide decision-making. After they were published, they were incorporated into hiring. This actually made what was a "culture fit interview" into a more specific and easier-to-think-fairly-about interview. They were also incorporated into the performance review process. They also occasionally get referred to when debating decisions--in the same way that one might refer to the principle of least surprise or information hiding when making a design decision.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the approach. One thing I might particularly recommend is to have a few nuanced stories about them being applied--to have a few examples where the company is willing to actually pay a cost (money, allocation of staff, the attention of leadership, opportunity cost, or whatever is relevant to the situation) to support people living up to the values.

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As far as subcultures: Well if you think its an important thing for your company to have board game nights every other Tuesday, make sure there is something to support the person who schedules and runs that.