The Instructor You Keep Is the Culture You Build

Hiring for values isn’t soft. It’s the most hard-nosed business decision you’ll make.

Most children’s activity businesses get the hiring sequence backwards. They look at availability first. Then experience. Then — maybe — whether the person actually fits the way the business runs.

Values come last, if at all.

That’s how you end up with a great swimmer who makes parents feel unwelcome. A brilliant language teacher who quietly undermines your systems. A dance instructor who is technically flawless and culturally corrosive.

You know the type. And you probably kept them too long.

Why values aren’t optional in your industry

Children’s activity businesses are trust businesses. Parents aren’t buying a lesson plan — they’re handing you their child and walking away. That act of trust is extended to every person in your building, on your schedule, in your WhatsApp thread.

One instructor who doesn’t live your values doesn’t just affect their class. They affect every parent conversation around them, every other instructor who watches what you tolerate, and eventually the reputation that took you years to build.

Research backs this up hard. A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that person-organisation value fit is one of the strongest predictors of both employee retention and job performance — more reliable than skills or experience alone. Google’s internal Project Aristotle research, which studied hundreds of teams over years, found that psychological safety — a direct product of shared norms and values — was the single biggest factor in team effectiveness. Not talent density. Not experience. Shared values and the safety they create.

Gallup’s ongoing workforce research puts it plainly: employees who feel their values align with their organisation’s are significantly more engaged, less likely to leave, and more likely to perform at a high level. In a sector where instructor turnover is one of the biggest hidden costs, that’s not a philosophical point — it’s a financial one.

What Gino Wickman got right

In Traction, Wickman introduces the People Analyser — a deceptively simple tool. You list your company’s core values. You list your people. You score each person on each value: plus (they embody it consistently), plus/minus (sometimes), or minus (they don’t).

The rule is straightforward: anyone with a minus on any core value is a problem. Not a maybe. Not a work-in-progress. A problem.

Wickman’s point isn’t cruelty — it’s clarity. A person who consistently undermines even one of your core values will erode your culture faster than any other single factor. And culture, once eroded, is expensive to rebuild.

He also draws a distinction that matters for every growing activity business: the Visionary and the Integrator.

The Visionary is the founder — the one with the idea, the energy, the ability to see around corners. They’re often the one who built the values in the first place, even if they never wrote them down.

The Integrator is the one who makes it run. Who takes the vision and turns it into a timetable, a payment system, a hiring process, a parent communication standard.

Most activity businesses break when the Visionary tries to be both. They’re great at inspiring a new instructor and terrible at making sure that instructor shows up consistently, documents what they teach, and follows the make-up class policy. The values get lived in some classes and ignored in others. That inconsistency is what kills retention.

You need both. And both need to hire against the same values.

The “birds of a feather” problem

There’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon called homophily — people gravitate toward people like themselves. In hiring, this creates invisible standards that have nothing to do with your stated values. You hire people you like. People who remind you of yourself. People who are comfortable in a room.

The result is a team that feels cohesive but isn’t actually aligned. You’ve hired personalities, not values.

The fix isn’t complicated, but it requires discipline:

Write your values down. Make them specific. Vague values — “passion,” “teamwork,” “dedication” — are useless as hiring tools. They mean everything and nothing. Zooza’s own values are worth studying as a model: “Ownership and process” is specific enough to ask a question about. “Personal growth with joy” is specific enough to probe. “Candid honesty” is specific enough to test.

Build interview questions around each value — and listen for behaviour, not rhetoric. “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a process and what you did about it” will tell you more about ownership and candid honesty than any number of questions about passion for children’s education.

Score candidates on values before you discuss skills. If someone scores a minus on even one of your core values, skills become irrelevant. A highly skilled instructor who doesn’t document their work, doesn’t respect the system, and resents feedback is not an asset. They’re a liability with a good demo class.

What to do, what not to do

Do:

• Run every candidate through a values interview before a trial class . Make it a non-negotiable step.
• Use the People Analyser on your existing team. Once a quarter. Be honest.
• When someone misses on a value, name it. Have the conversation. Give a specific example. Give a timeline.
• Recognise publicly when someone lives a value. Not generically — specifically. “The way you handled that parent call last week was exactly what ownership looks like here.”
• Build your onboarding around values , not just logistics. The first week sets the expectations that stick.

Don’t:

• Confuse skills for values. The best gymnastics coach in your city is not an asset if they undermine your team culture.
• Keep high performers who consistently miss on values. You are sending a message to every other person on your team about what you actually stand for. They’re watching.
• Let “we’re short-staffed” become the reason to lower the bar. Hiring a values mismatch in a crisis almost always makes the crisis worse.
• Skip the values conversation in annual reviews. If you only talk about attendance numbers and class ratings, you’re training your team that values are decoration, not expectation.

When someone consistently doesn’t fit

This is the part most owners avoid. It feels personal. It often is personal — you hired them, you may like them, they may be technically good.

But Wickman’s research and the broader organisational psychology literature are unambiguous: tolerating a consistent values violation damages the people around the violator more than it damages the violator. The people who do share your values watch you excuse the ones who don’t, and they recalibrate their own commitment accordingly.

The practical process: name the gap specifically, set a clear expectation with a time frame, check in. If the pattern continues, the decision has already been made — you’re just delaying it.

It’s not a pleasant part of running a business. It is, however, one of the most protective things you can do for the people who do show up every week and live what you say you stand for.

Why now, not later

Children’s activity businesses tend to address culture reactively — after a team falls apart, after a parent complaint goes viral in the local Facebook group, after a key instructor leaves and takes three classes worth of families with them.

The owners who scale — the ones who open second locations, who franchise, who build something that runs without them in every room — build on values infrastructure early. They don’t wait until the team is ten people to decide what the team stands for.

Wickman’s framing is useful here too: you can’t scale what has no logic, and you can’t systematise what has no values base. The two are connected. Your operations playbook only works if the people following it actually believe in the standards behind it.

Write the values. Use them to hire. Use them to review. Act on what you find.

One more thing: visibility creates accountability

Most instructor management problems aren’t values problems at their root — they’re visibility problems. When you don’t know who showed up, who taught what, who communicated with which parent and when, you can’t see the gap between stated values and actual behaviour.

That’s a solvable problem. Zooza’s instructor management tools give you the operational visibility to see what’s actually happening across your classes — attendance, communication, scheduling consistency. Values without visibility is aspiration. Values with visibility is a standard.

The bottom line

Hire for values first. Use a simple framework — Wickman’s People Analyser works, or build your own version with your specific values as the columns. Score honestly. Act on what you see.

The instructor you keep is the culture you build. And the culture you build is the business you scale — or the one that stalls because the wrong people were in the wrong seats for too long.

Birds of a feather really do flock together. The only question is which birds you invite in.

Further reading:

• Gino Wickman, Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business (BenBella Books) — the source of the People Analyser framework
• Kristof, A.L. (1996). Person-organisation fit: An integrative review of its conceptualizations, measurement, and implications. Personnel Psychology , 49(1), 1–49.
• Google re:Work, Project Aristotle — rework.withgoogle.com
• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace (annual) — gallup.com/workplace