“How Work Gets Done” Is Your Corporate Culture

The How Work Gets Done vs. the What Gets Done at Your Company
Every organization has its own priorities — the how people behave and the what they accomplish. In some “win-at-all-cost” cultures, like those climbing Mt. Everest who are willing to walk over a dying person to summit, the what — results — dominates, often rewarded far more than the how. In other environments, such sailors ready drop everything to respond to an SOS at sea, how you behave outweighs results.

Our organizational culture assessment data shows that either emphasis can succeed, depending on your strategy and marketplace. Yet the critical question remains: does your culture favor results over behavior? The temptation is understandable — every leader wants and needs meaningful outcomes.

Finding The Right Cultural Balance Between Results and Behaviors
For most organizations, success requires teams to be both high performing and high functioning. The art for leaders is striking the right balance between production (delivering results) and sustainable production capacity (engaging, developing, and retaining top talent).

How Work Gets Done
Corporate culture is essentially how work gets done in practice. It reflects the beliefs, assumptions, behaviors, processes, and business practices that guide daily activity. A high performance culture emerges when these behaviors are understood, consistent, and leveraged to achieve your organization’s unique strategy.

Why How Work Gets Done Matters
Strategy passes through culture and people — without alignment, even the best strategy fails. Research underscores this:

• Harvard studies show workplace culture can account for up to 50% of performance differences among companies in the same industry.
• Our organizational alignment research finds that cultural factors explain 40% of the gap between high- and low-performing companies in revenue growth, profitability, leadership effectiveness, customer loyalty, and employee engagement.

Leaders who understand and harness their culture gain a strategic edge. The organizations that outperform their competition aren’t just chasing results — they intentionally shape how their work gets done to drive sustained success.

Three Steps to Ensure the Right HOW for Your Strategy
Cultures happen by design or by default.  To ensure that the way work gets done is aligned with your strategy, take these three steps:

1. Define the Needed Culture to Best Execute Your Strategy
   Once you have enough strategic clarity and commitment for where you are headed, the next step is to have the executive leadership team define the specific behaviors required to drive your strategy forward across ten research-backed cultural dimensions. While some advocate for employees to define the culture, we believe that leaders must first define the cultural guardrails before asking for employee feedback and input.
2. Identify and Close Key Strategy-Culture Gaps
   Once your desired culture has been agreed upon, the next step is to assess your current culture to identify and prioritize key strategy-culture gaps that may impede your plans for success.  While it may be tempting to overhaul your culture to accelerate your plans, we recommend focusing on one or two cultural shifts with the greatest impact.
3. Align Accountability Mechanisms
   Even the most promising initiatives will falter without a strong culture of accountability. Sustained behavior change depends on a feedback system that is fair, transparent, accurate, relevant, timely, and meaningful — one that clearly communicates how individuals, teams, and the organization are performing in both the what (results) and the how (behaviors that drive those results).

   Leaders play a critical role: they must model the desired behaviors and openly accept feedback when they fall short. Equally, all team members should be expected and empowered to provide constructive, timely, and relevant feedback to peers, reinforcing accountability at every level of the organization.

The Bottom Line
How you define and shape your corporate culture is a decisive factor in the success or failure of your strategic priorities. As a business leader, are you taking every step to ensure that how work gets done in your organization is fully aligned with where your business needs to go?

To learn more about how work gets done, download How to Fully Build a Purposeful and Aligned Corporate Culture.