Design a High Performance Culture: The 4 Key Steps

What Corporate Culture Really Is — and What It Isn’t
To design a high performance culture starts with understanding what culture truly represents. Culture is your organization’s distinctive way of executing strategy. If strategy defines what you aim to achieve and why, culture defines how those goals are realized in practice — day in and day out.

Consider a concrete example: your organization sets a goal to grow market share by 10%. Achieving that target isn’t just about the number — it’s about the approach. Will you be a market adopter, refining and optimizing existing offerings like Kia? Or will you position yourself as a market creator, driving disruptive innovation like Tesla?

This choice goes beyond strategy — it directly shapes the “how work gets done” of your organization: the collective mindsets, behaviors, and decision-making patterns that determine execution. Culture is the invisible operating system that translates strategic intent into tangible results. Without a deliberate culture aligned to your strategy, even the most carefully crafted plans will struggle to deliver.

In essence, strategy and culture are inseparable. Strategy sets the destination; culture sets the path and pace. Every decision, interaction, and process either reinforces or undermines your ability to achieve your objectives. Recognizing this connection is the first step in building a culture that doesn’t just support goals — but accelerates them.

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 of organizational health, 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.

4 Steps to Design a High Performance Culture
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 culture to align with what you’re trying to achieve.  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 strategic ambitions. This 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 targeted behavioral shifts to 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 that the way work gets done 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 get to where you want to go.

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