How to Actually Use the Find Your People Study Guide
Find Your People Study Guide
I spent three years trying to build a team culture that actually stuck, and most of what I learned came from wrestling with David Kilmartin's "Find Your People" framework. The study guide that circulates online isn't official — it's a compilation of discussion questions, exercises, and reflection prompts that people assembled because the book itself doesn't hand you a structured workbook. Here's what works when you sit down with it. The core idea is straightforward: stop hiring for skill alone and start identifying people whose values align with your culture before they ever walk through the door. Kilmartin frames this around four pillars — shared values, shared purpose, shared risk, and shared reward. The study guide breaks these into discussion prompts that teams work through together, usually in a workshop setting or as a self-study exercise over a few weeks. Here's the thing nobody tells you upfront. The framework assumes you already know what your values are. If you don't, you're going to waste six weeks going in circles. I ran into this exact problem at a company where the executive team claimed their values were "integrity, innovation, and collaboration." Those words meant something different to every single person in the room. We spent an entire session arguing about what "innovation" actually required behaviorally before someone pointed out that we'd never written down what we were willing to sacrifice for it.
The workaround was brutal but effective. I had each person write down three decisions they'd made in the past year that cost them something personally — a promotion they turned down, a client they refused, a policy they pushed against. Those specific examples revealed actual values, not the laminated versions they recited in meetings. The resulting list was shorter, messier, and infinitely more useful.
How to structure your study sessions
Don't try to power through the entire guide in one sitting. The exercises are designed to produce uncomfortable honesty, and that degrades fast after forty-five minutes. I recommend breaking it into three one-hour blocks over two weeks, with a writing assignment between sessions. Block one covers values identification. Block two tackles purpose alignment. Block three works through the risk-reward dynamics and commitment structures. Each block should end with a written reflection, not just a group discussion. People say one thing in a room and write something completely different when they're alone at their desk. Both matter. The discussion questions themselves vary in quality. Some are genuinely useful — like the prompt asking you to describe a time when someone violated a core team value and what happened afterward. Others are vague enough that the conversation stalls immediately. When that happens, push back with a specific example from your own recent experience. The framework only works when you force it into concrete situations.
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Common pitfalls that will derail you
The biggest mistake I see is treating this as a hiring tool rather than a culture-building tool. You can absolutely use the questions to evaluate candidates, but the study guide is designed for existing teams to dig into their own dynamics first. If you bring it to new hires without your team having gone through it, you'll get performative agreement — people will say the right things because they want the job, not because they've actually examined whether they fit. Another trap is assuming consensus is the goal. The framework isn't about getting everyone to agree on everything. It's about making disagreements visible early so they don't surface destructively later. When two people on your team have genuinely incompatible values about risk tolerance, that's not a failure of the process — that's the process working exactly as intended. You need to decide, explicitly, whether that incompatibility is survivable in your organization. There's also a version of this study guide that gets shared around with modifications for remote teams. The original exercises assume physical presence and informal interaction, which makes translation tricky. One adaptation I found reasonable was replacing the "lunch and learn" style discussions with structured video calls that include breakout rooms, paired with async written responses in a shared document. The written component becomes even more important when people can't read the room.
What the framework misses
Kilmartin's model works well for small to medium teams in stable environments. It breaks down in two scenarios I've encountered repeatedly. First, high-growth startups where values need to shift every six months anyway — spending three weeks locking down a value statement that'll be obsolete by Q3 feels like wasted effort. Second, organizations with deep structural power imbalances where junior employees won't honestly engage with value exercises because they're still figuring out whether they'll have a job next quarter. In both cases, the framework produces clean answers to questions that don't have clean answers. If you're in either of those situations, pair the study guide with something more tactical. OKRs for the startup, explicit psychological safety norms for the high-turnover environment. The Find Your People framework isn't wrong — it's just narrow. It addresses cultural alignment, not scaling or survival pressures.
Where to find the guide
There's no single official source. The most complete versions circulate through LinkedIn, Reddit communities focused on organizational culture, and various HR forums. I've seen copies posted on Google Docs that range from fifteen pages to forty-plus, depending on who compiled them and what exercises they included. Look for versions that cite the original book chapters they're drawing from — that's a sign the compiler actually read the source material rather than summarizing from a blog review. Some versions include worksheets you can print. Others are discussion-only. I prefer the ones with the reflection templates because they create a paper trail of your team's evolution on these topics, which becomes genuinely useful when you're six months in and someone asks whether you actually committed to anything.
A practical exercise I'd add
The standard guide asks teams to identify shared values. I'd add one more step: have each person write down a specific behavior they will NOT tolerate from a teammate, and explain why. This reveals the enforcement side of values — the line-drawing that most frameworks skip. Values without consequences are just preferences, and teams that can't distinguish between the two end up frustrated when someone crosses a boundary that was never actually defined. The whole process usually takes between ten and fifteen hours spread over two to three weeks for a team of eight to twelve people. That's a real investment. If your team isn't willing to make it, you probably aren't ready to do the work the framework is asking you to do anyway.
