Do Employees Understand Your Desired Culture?

Do Employees Understand Your Desired Culture?
If you asked a cross-section of your employees to describe your company’s culture, would their responses match your intentions? Too often, leaders are surprised — and sometimes alarmed — by the gap between the culture they think they’ve built and the one employees actually experience day to day. When there’s a disconnect between how leaders want people to think and behave and how employees actually interact, collaborate, and make decisions, performance inevitably suffers.

The larger the divide between your current and desired culture, the harder it becomes to execute strategy effectively. Misalignment doesn’t just dilute engagement — it undermines your ability to attract and retain top talent, deliver on promises to customers, and sustain long-term performance.

The Importance of Cultural Alignment at Work
Cultural alignment is not a “soft” factor — it’s a measurable driver of business results.

• A 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 found that cultural factors account for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

In other words, culture is not a backdrop — it’s a core operating system that determines how strategy gets executed and how people perform. Companies that intentionally align culture with business and talent strategies outperform those that leave culture to chance. Are you sure that employees understand your desired culture?

What Corporate Culture Really Means
Corporate culture is best defined as how things truly get done in an organization — the underlying norms, values, and assumptions that shape daily behavior and decision-making. It goes far beyond the words printed on posters or the values listed on a website. Culture is revealed in how teams collaborate, how leaders make trade-offs, and how employees navigate pressure and uncertainty.

And make no mistake: leadership behavior sets the tone. The actions leaders model — more than any formal communication — signal what’s truly valued. Whether consciously designed or unintentionally tolerated, those signals ripple throughout the organization, shaping the culture that either supports or sabotages your strategic goals.

The most successful leaders recognize that culture is not static. It must evolve with shifts in strategy, market demands, and workforce expectations. They actively define, model, and reinforce the mindsets and behaviors required to win — closing the gap between aspiration and reality.

How Organizational Culture Can Work Against Corporate Strategy
Every organization has a culture — whether it’s intentionally shaped or unconsciously allowed to evolve. When that culture supports the company’s goals, it becomes a powerful accelerant. But when it doesn’t, even the best strategy will struggle to take hold. That’s why leaders must regularly examine cultural norms and behaviors to ensure they align with the company’s strategic direction.

A misaligned culture often shows up in subtle but damaging ways. If leaders fail to pay attention to how work gets done — how decisions are made, how risks are managed, how innovation is encouraged, and how customers are served — the organization’s culture can easily start working against its stated strategy.

Consider a recent example from a high-tech client that set out to deepen customer intimacy as a key competitive advantage. On paper, the strategy was sound. But in practice, internal systems and business practices still reflected an outdated, transactional mindset. Sales teams were constrained by rigid rules, and approvals took too long to support the customized, high-touch solutions customers demanded. The result? Delays, frustration, and missed opportunities. The culture simply wasn’t built to deliver on the new promise.

In another case, a financial services company pursued an ambitious growth strategy that required local teams to move quickly and make independent decisions. Yet the company’s entrenched top-down culture made that nearly impossible. Layers of approval slowed execution, undermined accountability, and frustrated talented leaders on the front lines. What was designed to be a bold scaling effort turned into an exercise in bureaucratic paralysis.

Both examples underscore the same truth: culture always wins in the contest between what’s written and what’s real. No matter how elegant the deliverables from your strategic retreat planning facilitation session, if your culture doesn’t support the new ways of thinking and behaving that strategy requires, progress will stall.

The most effective organizations close this gap by being explicit about the cultural shifts necessary for strategic success. They define what “good” looks like behaviorally, remove systemic barriers that reinforce old habits, and hold leaders accountable for modeling the change.

Four Steps to Shape the Corporate Culture You Want
A high-performing culture doesn’t happen by accident — it’s built with purpose, clarity, and discipline. The organizations that thrive are those that intentionally shape their culture to align with and accelerate their strategy. Here’s how to do it in four deliberate steps.

1. Create a Clear Strategy
   Every strategy must travel through people and culture before it reaches results. That’s why your first task is to ensure the “what” — your strategic intent — is unmistakably clear and credible to all stakeholders.

   Strategic clarity means your priorities can be captured on a single page and easily explained by the very people responsible for execution. If leaders across functions cannot articulate the strategy in their own words, it’s not yet clear enough to guide decisions or behaviors.

2. Define Your Desired Workplace Culture
   Once direction is set, leaders must define the “how”— the mindsets and behaviors that will best enable strategy execution. We recommend codifying your desired culture across 10 research-backed cultural dimensions such as customer orientation, information sharing, decision-making, innovation, and risk tolerance.

   When leaders align on what “great” looks like in each area — how to treat customers, how to lead teams, and how to respond under pressure — they give the organization a blueprint for how work gets done. This clarity prevents cultural drift and reinforces a shared sense of purpose.

3. Assess Your Current Workplace Culture
   Knowing the culture you want is only half the equation. The next step is to understand the culture you have. This means listening deeply to employees at all levels to uncover how work truly gets done—the unwritten rules, habits, and assumptions that drive behavior.

   A robust cultural assessment helps identify the most critical gaps between current and desired norms. These insights enable leaders to target interventions where they’ll have the most strategic impact rather than relying on generic culture initiatives that fail to move the needle.

4. Create a Plan to Close the Gaps
   Finally, turn insight into action. Define the specific practices, systems, and behaviors that will reinforce your desired culture. Communicate expectations transparently, track progress consistently, and hold leaders accountable for modeling and rewarding the right behaviors.

   Sustainable cultural change happens when everyday actions — from hiring and recognition to decision-making and customer engagement — reflect the culture you want to build. Leaders at every level must be visible stewards of that alignment.

The Bottom Line
A strong, strategically aligned culture is one of the most reliable predictors of long-term success. To transform culture from a set of abstract ideals into a tangible performance advantage, leaders must ensure that employees understand your desired culture and have a clear plan to close the culture gaps that matter most.

To learn more about how to ensure that your leaders and employees understand your desired culture, download The 3 Levels of Corporate Culture to Get Aligned for Higher Performance