Support Your Desired Culture: 6 Ways to Turn Values Into Action

How to Support Your Desired Culture Before the Wrong Behaviors Become the Real Culture

Do You Know How to Support Your Desired Culture — Or Are You Accidentally Rewarding the Wrong One?

Project postmortem data shows that most organizations can describe the culture they want. Far fewer consistently reinforce it.

That distinction matters because your real culture is not defined by the values on your website. It is defined by the behaviors leaders model, reward, tolerate, and correct every day.

When those signals conflict with stated corporate values, employees quickly learn which rules actually matter. The consequences can include:

• Ethical and compliance failures
• Loss of customer and employee trust
• Destructive workplace politics
• Lower engagement and accountability
• Strategy execution breakdowns

Two highly documented corporate failures illustrate what can happen when organizational systems reinforce behaviors that contradict stated expectations.

When Culture Rewards the Wrong Behaviors

• Wells Fargo
  In 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that employees opened more than two million deposit and credit card accounts that may not have been authorized. The CFPB specifically linked the behavior to a cutthroat corporate culture prioritizing results over ethics through sales targets and compensation incentives.The lesson goes beyond sales incentives: people pay attention to what gets rewarded, not just what leaders say they value.
• Volkswagen
  Volkswagen’s emissions scandal provides another widely cited example of the potentially enormous consequences when organizational pressures and behaviors become disconnected from stated standards.These are extreme cases. But corporate culture assessment data tells us that cultural misalignment usually begins much more quietly — transparency declines, team norms erode, a leader overlooks a behavior because a top performer delivers results, a team stops challenging bad decisions, or employees discover that hitting the number matters more than how they hit it.

6 Research-Backed Ways to Operationalize Your Ways of Working

If you notice your organization drifting toward a culture that undermines employee well-being, inhibits strategy execution, or threatens your company’s reputation, it’s time to act deliberately. These six strategies can help you strengthen the culture you want — preventing the erosion of trust, engagement, and overall organizational health that often precedes serious cultural failures:

1. Ruthlessly Align Culture With Strategy
   Strategy defines what you need to accomplish. Culture determines how work gets done to accomplish it.

   A growth strategy based on highly customized, relationship-driven solutions requires different behaviors than one based on standardized, high-volume transactions.

   That is why strategy-culture alignment matters. Identify the critical few cultural norms that your strategy requires, then remove business practices, processes, and incentives that work against them.

2. Make Leaders the Cultural Standard
   Employees watch leaders for clues about what is truly expected.

   If executives preach a culture of collaboration but reward individual heroics, collaboration loses. If leaders promote accountability but allow top performers to violate behavioral expectations, employees get the message.

   Your leaders, top performers, and key influencers should visibly model the desired behaviors — especially when doing so is difficult or costly.

   Culture becomes credible when leaders are held to the same standards as everyone else.

3. Turn Abstract Values Into Observable Behaviors
   Values such as integrity, innovation, collaboration, and customer focus sound compelling but leave enormous room for interpretation.

   Define what each value looks like behaviorally.

   What should people do more of? What should they stop doing? What behaviors should managers recognize, coach, and measure?

   Employees cannot consistently support a desired culture if they cannot recognize it in action.

4. Create Space for Different Perspectives
   A strong workplace culture should create alignment without creating conformity.

   Employees need enough psychological team safety to question assumptions, challenge decisions, and introduce different perspectives without unnecessary interpersonal risk.

   A recent McKinsey analysis of 1,265 companies across 23 countries found that greater leadership diversity continued to be associated with a higher likelihood of financial outperformance. Importantly, McKinsey also emphasizes inclusion and creating environments where diverse voices are genuinely heard.

   The cultural objective should not be agreement. It should be productive debate followed by aligned action.

5. Measure the Culture You Are Actually Creating
   Do not rely on aspirations or annual engagement scores alone.

   Track the behaviors that matter most to your strategy through a balanced set of people, customer, operational, and financial metrics. Look specifically for gaps between stated values and everyday employee experiences.

   During cultural change, measure both outcomes and the behavioral leading indicators required to achieve them.

6. Reward the Right Results — Achieved the Right Way
   This is where culture becomes real.

   Recognition, promotions, compensation, performance reviews, rewards, and consequences should reinforce both what people accomplish and how they accomplish it.

   The Wells Fargo case demonstrates the potential danger when incentives overpower other expectations. The CFPB subsequently warned that poorly managed incentives tied to unrealistic sales goals can encourage unauthorized accounts, deceptive practices, and other misconduct.

   If someone produces exceptional results while consistently violating your desired cultural norms, rewarding them sends a powerful signal: results matter more than values.

The Bottom Line
To support your desired culture, stop treating culture as a set of aspirations and start treating it as the operating system required for high performance. Define the critical few behaviors your strategy requires, ensure leaders model them, embed them into how people work, measure whether they are happening, and hold employees accountable for both results and behaviors. Your culture is ultimately shaped by what happens when values and short-term results collide — because what leaders reward, tolerate, and correct becomes the culture employees believe.

Your culture is either accelerating your strategy — or sabotaging it.  To learn more about how to protect and support your desired culture, download How to Build a Culture That Makes Your Strategy Easier to Execute

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.