THE RELATIONABLE TOOLKIT
Culture, Intentionally Designed
This talk brings the core message of The Relationable Toolkit to life: culture is not something you inherit, it is something you design. Leaders and teams are always building culture, whether they intend to or not. Every reaction, tone shift, silence, and moment of honesty becomes part of the architecture of belonging.
Drawing from the three major tool groups in the book, Culture Setting Tools, Safety Creation Tools, and Self-Discipline Tools, this session teaches participants how to create trust through clarity, reduce friction with intention, and regulate emotional heat before it spreads through a team.
Through stories such as the warehouse fire, the political division at work, and the rebuilding of your own emotional intelligence, Justin offers a practical path for leaders who want to cultivate cultures that remain steady during conflict, connected during change, and aligned through growth.
The Relationable Toolkit is functional emotional intelligence for real organizations, delivered with humor, vulnerability, and actionable tools anyone can use.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Understand
Participants will learn the foundational ideas from The Relationable Toolkit including:
The three categories of tools described in the book: Culture Setting Tools, Safety Creation Tools, and Self-Discipline Tools.
Why clear expectations, consistent leadership, and transparent agreements create psychological safety and trust.
The difference between mistakes, misunderstandings, and mistrust, and how each one affects culture differently.
Participants leave with a clear understanding of what culture is, how it forms, and which behaviors maintain or disrupt it.
2. Analyze
Participants will examine the root causes of friction inside a culture by:
Identifying where power dynamics, unclear rules, and unspoken norms conflict with stated values.
Distinguishing between boundaries, rules, and edicts, and learning why each one affects alignment differently.
Studying real organizational patterns through the lens of curiosity rather than blame.
This section teaches teams how to diagnose the actual cause of cultural breakdown rather than reacting to symptoms.
3. Apply
Participants will learn to use tools directly from the book to shift culture in real time, including:
Using Culture Setting Tools to regulate emotional heat, slow reactivity, and model calm leadership
Applying Safety Creation Tools to repair trust and cultivate psychological safety.
Using The Self-Discipline Tools to deepen emotional self-discipline, strengthen consistency, and build relational stamina.
These tools are simple, repeatable, and designed to help teams move from reacting to responding.
4. Evaluate and Integrate (for workshops only)
Participants will integrate the Relationable methodology into their daily leadership by:
Assessing team behavior for alignment with shared agreements.
Evaluating where the culture drifts and why.
Creating a personalized Culture Toolkit to guide their team’s next ninety days of interactions, decisions, and repairs.
This section brings the entire book full circle by translating relational insight into consistent relational practice.
IN SUMMARY
The Relationable Toolkit helps leaders understand how culture forms, analyze where it drifts, and apply practical tools that transform friction into collaboration. It is the emotional infrastructure needed to build teams that are kind, consistent, resilient, and aligned.
This talk brings the nine tools of The Relationable Toolkit to life, offering a clear way for people to practice emotional intelligence on purpose, minute by minute, conversation by conversation, until trust becomes the natural temperature of the room.