Founder: Rory Sylvia

Why I love this work

In past careers, I did what I could to improve culture, but no matter how many development programs I was a part of or leadership and self-help books I read, I still felt like I lacked the skills to shape culture. If culture “eats strategy for breakfast,” then why wasn’t anyone teaching us how to shape culture?

My perspective on culture change was upended when I worked on the global culture team at The Boeing Company. We partnered with an external organizational transformation company to improve our team’s ways of working so that we could go out and teach others around the company. We were a team of teams, fully remote, distributed across the United States and Europe.

Prior to the partnership, our team was experiencing the all-too-common signs of an unhealthy organization. We had good intentions, but we lacked trust, worked in silos, hoarded information, experienced a seemingly constant shift in priorities, and had far too many meetings.

We started running experiments to change our team culture, learning new meeting structures, decision-making processes, and mindsets in order to show up and move work forward together—while building trust, community, connection, shared ownership, and accountability. We improved our ways of working one day at a time, celebrating what was working while experimenting to improve the things that weren’t. We didn’t need a perfect plan—just a place to start.

And it worked.

Our team moved from being leader-led to team-driven, where we were all a part of shaping how we worked together. We were so connected and laser-focused that we were running circles around the other teams in our organization. It felt like being a part of an all-star team, and it was because of the ways we worked, as well as a manager who had the courage to support us in working differently.

If something wasn’t working, we designed an experiment to improve it. We were committed to testing and learning our way into our desired future and culture. Long story short, that ended up being the best work experience of my life.

Ever since, I’ve believed that everyone deserves a work experience like that—and I know how to help them create it.

I founded The Ways We Work because everyone deserves access to the mindsets and tools needed to transform the ways they work and do the best work of their lives.

You can do it too! You don’t need an organizational development degree or development programs to positively shape culture. You just need the courage to think and work differently, stick with it long enough to see what’s working and what isn’t, and then navigate based on what’s happening.

With 17 years of experience at global corporations like Costco, Boeing, and Starbucks, I’ve worked across a variety of functions—including Leadership & Professional Development, Human Resources, Manufacturing, Engineering, and Organizational Transformation. I’ve led high-impact initiatives like Starbucks’ hybrid workplace employee experience strategy and Boeing’s global first-line manager development program. As a consultant, I’ve collaborated with both startups and large organizations, including The Boeing Company, C2 Technologies, and the University of Washington, to drive meaningful change and improve team effectiveness.