Live Your Desired Workplace Culture: 10 Smart Tips

What Is Corporate Culture?
If you want to live your desired workplace culture, you need to first be clear about what culture is and isn’t.  Corporate culture is how work actually gets done — not what’s written on posters or stated in corporate value decks. It shows up in the decisions people make, the behaviors they reward or tolerate, and how work moves through the organization when no one is watching.  

Culture can be measured by examining how people think, behave, and collaborate day to day. It is shaped by both explicit values and the unspoken assumptions that influence priorities, risk-taking, accountability, and execution.  These invisible norms often have more impact on performance than any formal policy or process.

To live your desired workplace culture, defining it is just the first step. Culture only becomes real when leaders consistently model it, systems reinforce it, and employees experience it in how work is assigned, decisions are made, and success is recognized. If your stated culture and lived culture do not match, the lived culture always wins.

The Ability to Live Your Desired Workplace Culture and It’s Impact on a Company’s Success
A healthy, high-performing, and strategically aligned culture acts as an emotional force multiplier. It energizes people, accelerates decision-making, and makes talent and business strategy execution far easier than it would be otherwise. When culture and strategy reinforce each other, effort compounds instead of dissipating.

By contrast, an unhealthy, toxic, or misaligned workplace culture quietly erodes performance. It slows execution, breeds frustration, and forces leaders to spend time managing around the organization rather than leading it forward. Importantly, strength alone is not the issue. Some strong cultures clearly enhance performance — Southwest Airlines is a classic example. Others are equally strong yet destructive to results, as seen in long-standing performance challenges within organizations like the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Here’s what the latest research says about a healthy and aligned culture:

• One recent Harvard Business School research report described how an effective culture can account for up to half of the differential in performance between organizations in the same industry. 
  
  
• Our organizational alignment research shows that cultural factors account for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer retention, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. 

Be Aware That Workplace Cultures Evolve
Workplace cultures — strong or weak — are not static. They evolve over time as markets shift, leaders change, and strategies are tested. How leaders intentionally define, shape, and reinforce culture has become a decisive factor in the success or failure of both people initiatives and business strategy.

The most effective leaders understand that culture is a powerful lever for performance when it is aligned with strategic intent. They use it deliberately to clarify priorities, guide decisions, and drive consistent execution across the organization.

At the same time, they recognize that cultural change requires discipline and patience. Culture shifts through thousands of daily signals, not grand announcements. Expect progress, not overnight transformation. Sustainable cultural change happens when leaders stay the course and reinforce new behaviors long enough for them to become the new normal.

How to Evolve Toward and Live Your Desired Workplace Culture
To create a healthy, high performing, and aligned culture, begin by asking the following questions:

• Is Our Culture Healthy Enough to Push for Higher Performance?
  Do employees trust their leaders, peers, and the organization?  Are friends and family referred for employment?  Does the majority of the workforce plan to stay for the next 12 months? 
  
  If people disengage or resist change, you may need to increase your organizational health before you move forward.
  
  
• Is Our Culture Setting People Up to Perform at their Peak?
  Do employees have clear performance and behavioral standards?  Does everyone know how they and their team are performing?  Is their enough motivation, meaning, and accountability for people to perform at their peak?  
  
  If you have high performance variation, you may need to tighten your performance environment before shifting gears and asking people to lift their performance.
  
  
• Is Our Culture Helping or Hindering Strategy Execution?
  Are mindsets, behaviors, and business practices 100 percent aligned with moving key strategic priorities forward?  Does everyone agree on how customers should be treated?  How decisions should be made?  How information should be shared?  How risks should be taken?  How work should get done?
  
  If it is hard to move strategic initiatives forward, you may need to clarify how work gets done to remove barriers, reduce misalignments, and improve team cohesion.

10 Field-Tested Tips to Better Live Your Desired Workplace Culture

1. Do Not Aim for Drastic Cultural Shifts
   The most effective cultural change efforts build from what already exists. Rather than attempting a wholesale transformation, work with — and within — your current culture as much as possible. Every organization has cultural strengths that can be leveraged, even if the culture itself is not fully aligned with strategy.

   Start by clearly assessing your current culture. Identify its dominant traits and understand which behaviors and norms support your strategic direction and which quietly undermine it. This clarity allows leaders to make informed, targeted choices instead of launching broad, disruptive initiatives.

   Focus next on a small number of high-impact adjustments. Modifying a few critical behaviors, decision rules, or reinforcement mechanisms often produces far greater results than sweeping change programs. Cultural evolution is most sustainable when it feels achievable, relevant, and rooted in how people already work.

2. Start with Changes to Key Behaviors
   Simply communicating desired behaviors rarely changes anything. Culture is shaped far more by what people do every day than by what leaders say they value. Messages alone do not override habits, incentives, or observed leadership behavior.

   Neuroscience reinforces this reality. In practice, people tend to act their way into believing rather than think their way into acting. When behaviors change consistently, mindsets begin to shift to justify and reinforce those actions.

   For leaders, the implication is clear: focus first on changing a small set of critical behaviors that matter most to performance and strategy. Redesign workflows, decision rights, incentives, and leadership routines to make the right behaviors easier and the wrong ones harder. As those behaviors take hold, beliefs and attitudes will follow — and culture will begin to change in a meaningful, lasting way.

3. Focus on the Critical Few
   Transforming culture does not require changing everything at once. The most effective approach is to identify the few high-impact behaviors that truly drive organizational health, performance, and strategy execution.

   By concentrating efforts on these critical behaviors, leaders can generate disproportionate results with less change resistance and greater sustainability. Small, targeted adjustments in how key work gets done can ripple across the organization, reinforcing alignment, accountability, and change momentum without overwhelming people or disrupting operations.

4. Rely on Influencers
   Identify employees who naturally shape how work gets done — those whose behavior others observe, respect, and emulate. These influencers can model desired behaviors, amplify key messages, and provide candid feedback to leadership.
   
   Leveraging and actively engaging influencers accelerates cultural change because they make abstract values tangible. When others see respected peers consistently acting in alignment with the desired culture, the behaviors become aspirational rather than mandated. In essence, influencers turn cultural ideals into everyday practice.
   
   
5. Ensure Leadership Buy-In
   For cultural change to take root, senior leaders must visibly commit to and champion the desired behaviors. Words alone are insufficient — if leaders say one thing but act another, the message is immediately undermined, and the culture stalls.
   
   Leaders set the tone through their daily decisions, priorities, and interactions. When they consistently model the behaviors they expect, they create credibility, build trust, and signal that the new culture is non-negotiable. Leadership alignment is the single most powerful accelerator of sustainable cultural change.
   
   
6. Paint a Clear Vision of Success
   Clarity drives commitment. Employees must understand not just what behaviors are expected, but why those behaviors matter and how they directly support both people and business objectives.

   A vivid, well-communicated vision connects daily actions to tangible outcomes, showing employees how their contributions reinforce the desired culture and advance organizational goals. When people see the link between their work and meaningful results, they are far more likely to adopt and sustain the behaviors that make the culture real.

7. Showcase the Impact Quickly
   Early wins make cultural change real. Use pilot programs or targeted initiatives to demonstrate how new behaviors improve both employee experience and business outcomes.

   Visible success stories create momentum, build credibility, and reinforce that the effort is worthwhile. When people see tangible results from the cultural shift, motivation rises, adoption accelerates, and the change begins to embed itself across the organization.

8. Actively Involve Those Affected by Change
   Change communication alone is not enough — lasting cultural change requires active participation from those most impacted. Involving employees in shaping and implementing changes ensures the shift is practical, relevant, and embraced rather than imposed.

   At a minimum, key stakeholders should have the authority and flexibility to adapt initiatives in ways that work for their teams. When people have a voice in the process, they take ownership, reinforce new behaviors, and help embed the culture across the organization.

9. Align Structures, Systems, and Processes
   For cultural change to stick, your organization’s structures, systems, and processes must reinforce the desired behaviors. Misaligned incentives, workflows, or performance metrics can easily undermine even the best-intentioned initiatives.

   For example, if your goal is to foster collaboration, ensure that recognition, rewards, and decision-making processes prioritize team outcomes over individual accomplishments. When the organization’s architecture consistently supports the behaviors you want to see, culture shifts from aspiration to reality.

10. Continue the Work
    High-performing organizations treat culture as a living system, not a one-time project. They continuously track progress, adjust initiatives, and reinforce behaviors to keep culture aligned with strategy and evolving business needs.

    Cultural change requires ongoing attention — successes must be celebrated, challenges addressed, and new behaviors nurtured over time. By treating culture as an enduring priority, organizations ensure it remains a powerful driver of performance rather than a fleeting initiative.

The Bottom Line
Culture is far from abstract — it is a dynamic force that shapes behavior, decisions, and results. Research shows it accounts for roughly 40% of the difference between high- and low-performing organizations and teams. The critical question for every leader is this: Is your culture driving performance and engagement, or is it quietly holding your people and business back?

To learn more about how to live your desired workplace culture, download 3 Research-Backed Levels of Culture to Get Right

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.