Powerful Corporate Culture: A Foundation for Accelerating Performance

A Powerful Corporate Culture Can Propel a Strategy Forward
Building a truly powerful corporate culture is challenging — and replicating it is even harder. Yet, if your goal is to elevate both business outcomes and employee performance, intentionally shaping your culture may be the single most impactful move you can make. Too often, corporate culture is misunderstood as merely creating a “fun” or “happy” workplace, or being recognized as a great place to work.

We define corporate culture differently.

A Powerful Corporate Culture Defined
Culture is the engine behind organizational behavior — it shapes how people think, decide, and act every day. Your workplace culture is the heartbeat of your company, reflecting the shared values, team norms, assumptions, and business practices that guide daily behavior. Every organization has a culture, but no two are alike.

Put simply, culture is how business actually gets done — beyond policies, titles, or mission statements.

A Powerful Corporate Culture Impacts Your People and Your Business
Our organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performance in terms of:

• Revenue growth.
• Profitability.
• Customer loyalty.
• Leadership effectiveness.
• Employee engagement.

Can a Workplace Culture Be Too Powerful?
The short answer: yes. The longer answer: it depends. We assess culture across three dimensions. For two of these, a strong culture is almost always an advantage — fueling alignment, engagement, and performance. But for the third dimension, an overly rigid or dominant culture can backfire, creating blind spots, stifling innovation, and even putting the business at risk.  Boeing, VW, and Wells Fargo are three recent examples of powerful cultures that did harm.

Powerful Corporate Culture:  The Three Areas of Culture to Get Right

• The Little C: Health
  Organizational health reflects the values and behaviors that are consistently practiced throughout a company. Most organizations naturally strive for health, and employees are drawn to environments where it exists. While it’s nearly impossible for a workplace to be “too healthy,” achieving a baseline of organizational health is essential — it lays the foundation for a corporate culture capable of driving sustained high performance.
• The Middle C: Performance
  The next key ingredient of a strong corporate culture is the performance environment. People respond to the conditions around them, and leaders play a critical role in shaping those conditions to consistently elicit their best work — while staying aligned with the organization’s values, behaviors, and strategy.

  At this level, culture can become too powerful. Pushing for higher performance without providing clarity, purpose, and accountability often backfires, creating stress and actually reducing results. The wrong kind or amount of pressure applied in the wrong way can undermine an entire organization.

  Exceptional leaders understand how to calibrate performance pressure — knowing when to push, when to support, and how to create an environment where people thrive while driving results.

• Big C: Strategic Alignment
  The third — and often most underutilized — level of culture is its alignment with strategy. The aim is to craft a purposeful culture that directly supports and accelerates your business objectives. Unlike performance pressure, it’s rarely possible for strategic alignment to be “too strong.” When culture and strategy are fully synchronized, every decision, behavior, and initiative reinforces the company’s goals, creating a powerful engine for sustained success.

The Four Steps to Create a Powerful Corporate Culture that Is Aligned with Your Strategy

1.  Define the Needed Culture

• Agree upon strategic priorities.
• Identify and most critical cultural beliefs needed to best accomplish the strategy.
• Define how to think about doing the work, not just what work needs to be completed.

2.  Assess the Current Culture

• Pinpoint the key culture gaps between the current and strategically needed culture.
• Identify cultural areas (health and strategy) which have the greatest strategic and performance impact.
• Establish metrics to track progress and the success of the transformation.

3.  Create a Plan to Close the Key Culture Gaps

• Prepare people leaders to become culture champions and realign ways of working.
• Address organizational health issues which may create road blocks.
• Create action plans to create alignment with change agents.

4.  Close the Key Culture Gaps

• Establish accountability and alignment targets.
• Establish monthly tracking rate of KPI’s.
• Align processes, rewards, and consequences.

If you want to learn more about how to design a powerful corporate culture, download A Purposeful and Aligned Organizational Culture – Your DNA for Success

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.