How Leaders Maximize Corporate Culture

Do Your Leaders Maximize Corporate Culture to Rally Their Teams?
When we assess organizational culture, most business and HR leaders acknowledge a hard truth: their culture is not strong or consistent enough to meaningfully engage employees or drive sustained business performance. That gap is a material business risk.

• Organizational culture matters — a lot. Our organizational alignment research shows that workplace culture explains 40% of the performance difference between high- and low-performing companies.
  
  
• Deloitte research reinforces this reality, finding that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a clear, well-defined culture is critical to business success.

The implication is straightforward. Culture is not a “soft” issue delegated to HR; it is a leadership lever that directly shapes strategy execution, accountability, and results.

What Truly Drives Employee Behavior
Employee behavior is shaped by what leaders expect, tolerate, reward, hold accountable, and model every day. People watch their leaders closely for cues about what really matters — not what is said in town halls, but what is reinforced through decisions and actions. Most leaders understand this dynamic and invest time communicating the importance of culture. In too many organizations, however, leadership effort stops there.

Change communication is a necessary element of any organizational change or transformation effort, but it is insufficient on its own to sustain or shift corporate culture. Culture does not change because leaders declare new values or distribute new messaging. If your culture requires even a modest adjustment, it demands more than verbal endorsement of desired behaviors.

Real impact comes when leaders consistently act in ways that reinforce the culture they want to create. That means aligning everyday decisions, performance management, incentives, processes, and systems with the stated cultural expectations. When what leaders say, do, reward, and tolerate are fully aligned, culture becomes a powerful performance engine. That is how leaders actively maximize corporate culture for the benefit of their people and the business.

How Leaders Maximize Corporate Culture

Most employees report a sobering reality: fewer than one-third of leaders consistently behave in ways that align with the organization’s stated culture. Even fewer believe that everyday business practices and systems actually support the culture the company claims to value.

That gap raises an uncomfortable question — what’s really going on?

The answer is a persistent disconnect between how culture is communicated and how it is experienced in daily work. Values are discussed, posters are printed, and messages are shared, yet the behaviors leaders reward, tolerate, and prioritize often tell a different story.

If you want leaders to truly maximize corporate culture, the focus must shift from talking about culture to operationalizing it:

1. Define and Communicate
   Begin with a clear-eyed assessment of your current organizational culture so you understand where you truly stand — not where you hope to be. Then explicitly define the culture required to achieve your people and business objectives, and communicate it in a way that is simple, focused, and actionable.
   
   Avoid broad statements and vague aspirations. Concentrate on the few cultural priorities that matter most and that leaders can realistically reinforce every day.
   
   Ask the hard question: Is your desired culture clear, concrete, and consistently understood across the organization?
   
   
2. Role Model
   Once the desired culture is clearly defined and communicated, leaders must bring it to life through their own behavior. Both formal and informal leaders set the standard by how they think, act, make decisions, and get work done — especially when the pressure is on.
   
   Employees do not follow stated values; they follow visible behavior. If leaders do not consistently model the desired ways of working, the culture will default to what it has always been.
   
   The critical question: Do your leaders truly walk the talk, every day?
3. Manage Business Processes and Practices
   What leaders say and do matters — but research tells a surprising story. Gartner found that the combined impact of leadership behavior on employee alignment with culture is just 6%, with verbal communication alone contributing only 1%. The real multiplier lies elsewhere: the business processes, budgets, policies, and organizational structures leaders put in place. These mechanisms shape day-to-day work and consistently signal what behaviors are rewarded, tolerated, or ignored — driving culture far more effectively than words or gestures alone.
   
   The essential question for leaders: Have you operationalized your desired culture through the structures and systems that actually guide work and enable higher performance?

The Bottom Line
To align your people with the desired culture and team norms, leaders must go beyond words. They need to clearly communicate expectations, consistently model the behaviors they seek, and embed those expectations into the business structures, processes, and systems that drive day-to-day work. Without this full alignment, even the best messaging will produce only minimal impact — leaving your workforce disconnected from the culture you aspire to create.

To learn more about living your desired corporate culture, download the 3 Levels of Culture High Performing Leaders 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.