At the Women in Retail Leadership Circle’s Girl Talks East event in New York City last month, Miki Racine Berardelli, chief executive officer at KIDBOX, a kid’s style box that delivers cool brands, shared her simple yet profound secret to building and defining a corporate culture.

Berardelli explained to the group an exercise she developed around building and defining her teams, which she calls “project aspire.” The exercise involves scheduling  an off-site meeting with your team, at which each team member is required to come prepared with five or six adjectives about how they want to be described by other people as a professional.

“I ask team members to come with a set of words they would use to describe themselves,” Berardelli said. “What’s the business legacy that you’re creating for yourself?”

The team members’ words are printed on Post-it notes and then placed on an easel.

“There could be 30, 40 or 50 adjectives depending on the size of your team,” said Berardelli. “Then I ask them to cull the words down, as a team, to the five or six adjectives that they all agree with and are on board with.”

The exercise, Berardelli said, enables everyone to work together as a team to define how they’re going to present themselves, collectively as a team, to their leader.

“To me, that’s company culture,” Berardelli said. “It’s a little bit of science that I’ve created as a leader because I believe that culture is really all that matters in business. Culture is the thing that trumps anything else.”

Berardelli credits the exercise for being instrumental to her business success. “[This exercise] has given me a lot of strength as a leader, and it has given me guidance as a professional. If there’s any gift I can give to you tonight, it’s this. Take this back to where you work and apply it. It’s life- and work-changing.”

Culture is critical to Berardelli, and the reason why she ended up at KIDBOX.

“The No. 1 thing that that drew me to this opportunity, after having really big jobs in really big companies and then going to a startup, was the opportunity to build a culture from the ground up as a woman CEO,” noted Berardelli. “And we are rare.” (Previously, Berardelli was the president of digital commerce and chief marketing officer at Chico’s FAS. Before Chico’s, Berardelli served as chief marketing officer at Tory Burch.)

“The percentage of women in CEO roles is still so tiny,” Berardelli said. “But when you think of our influence around how we consume and how we influence purchasing power, it’s not commensurate. I’m not OK with that. I’m not OK with the disconnect.”