How to Design a High Performance Culture: 4 Key Steps

What Corporate Culture Really Is — and What It Isn’t
Do you know how to design a high-performance culture? Culture is your organization’s unique way of executing strategy. If strategy defines what you want to accomplish and why, culture defines how you get it done every day.

Take a simple example: your organization wants to grow market share by 10%. To reach that goal, what’s your strategic approach? Should you be a market adopter, improving and optimizing existing offerings (like Kia)? Or should you aim to be a market creator, introducing disruptive innovations (like Tesla)?

That decision shapes the “how” of your organization — the collective mindsets and behaviors that drive execution. Because strategy must go through people and culture to become reality, these choices represent the essence of your culture.

What Corporate Culture Is NOT

Culture is not just about fun.
A vibrant, engaging workplace matters, but it’s not what makes you distinct. Every healthy company aspires to that.

Culture is not just about corporate values.
Values like integrity, inclusion, and accountability are essential — but they’re not differentiators. Nearly every organization claims them. The real question is: how do those values come to life in the way your people actually work?

Culture is not just about employee engagement.
Engagement is critical, but it’s only one dimension of organizational health. It reflects how employees feel, not necessarily how they execute.

The Point
None of these elements — fun, values, or engagement — truly define what makes your organization unique. They are the baseline, not the differentiator.

Your workplace culture is your organization’s distinctive approach to how work gets done. It’s the system of shared beliefs and habitual behaviors that set your company apart.

Research from our recent Organizational Alignment Study shows that culture accounts for roughly 40% of the difference between high- and low-performing companies in revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. Similar findings from Kotter and Heskett’s landmark research at Harvard underscore that adaptive, strategically aligned cultures outperform others by up to 765% in net income growth over a decade.

Don’t Build Your Corporate Culture – Shape It
Your corporate culture already exists. It emerged the moment your organization set strategic goals. The challenge isn’t creating culture — it’s measuring and shaping it to align with what you’re trying to achieve.

4 Steps to Design a High Performance Culture
How leaders define and shape their corporate culture however can make or break their strategies.  To align your culture with your strategy:

1. Define the Needed Culture
   Engage strategic decision-makers in clarifying the mindsets and behaviors required to achieve key goals. Their strategic clarity sets the cultural foundation.
2. Measure the Current Culture
   Interview and survey employees to assess the current culture to identify key gaps between the current and desired culture.
3. Prepare People Leaders
   Equip leaders to interpret results, lead honest cultural conversations, and guide teams through behavioral shifts that enable strategic success.
4. Set Up Ongoing Support
   Establish internal culture champions to monitor progress, remove obstacles, and sustain accountability as the organization evolves.

The Bottom Line
Cultural alignment ensures your culture accelerates — not obstructs — strategy execution. When deliberately measured and shaped, culture becomes a lasting competitive advantage. The question isn’t whether you have a culture; it’s whether your culture is aligned with your strategy — and whether it’s helping you win.

To learn more about how to design a high performance culture, download The 3 Levels of a High Performance Culture that Leaders Must Get Right