Make Culture Change Stick: An Underutilized Method

Culture’s Role in Driving Business Success
Our organizational alignment research shows that workplace culture — how work actually gets done — accounts for 40% of the performance gap between high- and low-performing companies. Deloitte’s latest findings reinforce this: 94% of executives and 88% of employees agree that a clearly defined company culture is critical to business success. The real challenge, however, is how to make culture change stick. Because at the end of the day, culture determines whether your strategy succeeds or stalls.

Making Culture Change Stick

Organizational change is hard — and transforming corporate culture is among the toughest challenges a company can face. To make culture change stick, leaders must do more than articulate a compelling vision for change; they must take visible and consistent actions. The most successful organizations see leaders actively commit to change through repeated, clear messaging, role modeling the desired behaviors, and holding employees accountable for actions and results that reinforce the new culture. Without this visible, sustained leadership engagement, even the best-intentioned culture initiatives risk fading before they take root.

The Power of Symbols in Culture Change
During periods of change, change management training experts know that symbols often serve as the most visible and immediate signals of what is expected. By their nature, symbols stand for something beyond themselves — they translate abstract values and behaviors into tangible, recognizable cues.

In a corporate context, a clock can symbolize time management, a scale can represent work-life balance, a target can reinforce focus on goals, and an elephant can highlight the issues no one dares to address. When it comes to the ability to make culture change stick, many organizations underutilize symbolic assets that can shape behavior and reinforce new ways of working. These include:

• How work is organized and prioritized
• Who sits where and how space is allocated
• Which stories are told and celebrated
• How teams are structured and collaborate
• The first impressions created upon entering the office
• How business practices are designed
• Allocation of offices, parking, and other resources
• Where time, energy, and budget are invested
• Recognition of accomplishments
• Consequences for failure
• Promotion and termination decisions
• The ways teams coordinate and interact

Leveraging these symbolic elements intentionally can transform abstract cultural goals into lived, observable behaviors — making change both real and enduring.

The Power of Symbolic Actions to Make Culture Change Stick
Symbolic actions serve as powerful, visible reminders of what is changing and why. When used intentionally, they turn abstract expectations into concrete experiences. For example, if you want to spark greater innovation, pass a light bulb around during a roundtable brainstorming session. The act itself signals permission — every idea is welcome. Leaders who visibly model curiosity and openness create space for diverse, novel, and unexpected ideas, which can later be evaluated for feasibility, strategic alignment, and consistency with company values.

Change simulation research consistently shows that culture change is far more likely to succeed when leaders model the behaviors they expect others to adopt — more than five times more likely, in fact. Employees pay close attention to what leaders do, not just what they say. Visible, repeated proof of leadership commitment is what prompts real behavioral change and builds credibility. Without that proof, culture initiatives remain theoretical; with it, change becomes tangible and sustainable.

The Bottom Line
Culture change accelerates when symbols and actions consistently reinforce the behaviors you expect. Leaders who deliberately align visible actions with desired outcomes make change tangible and harder to ignore. The challenge — and opportunity — is to use symbols creatively and credibly to keep people focused, aligned, and accountable as an aligned and high performance culture takes hold.

To learn more about how to make culture change stick, download Changing Corporate Culture: 4 Do’s and 3 Don’ts

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.