Every organization has a culture. The question is whether the one they have matches the one they describe.

Most culture work starts in the wrong place. Leaders gather in a room, write down a set of values, design a rollout, put the words on the wall, and then wait for something to change. When it doesn't, the follow-up is usually more communication: town halls, culture decks, and values-based performance reviews. When that fails, they build training events or bring in outside companies to get employees on board. It isn’t uncommon for these events to happen on a yearly basis.

When culture fails to take shape, leadership tends to shift the blame to their employees, but the problem is the mechanism for bringing about change.

The intention is real, but culture doesn’t change in a boardroom. It happens in the day-to-day actions and how the organization shows up to support their people.

Culture isn't what an organization says it values. It's what the organization's systems make it easy, rewarding, and normal to do. Those systems—the ones governing information flow, resource allocation, how decisions get made, what gets measured, what gets recognized—are what actually produce behavior. Behavior, repeated across time and people, is what culture is.

Kate Graham

Principal, Humaneering Performance

Tom Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model puts the environment before the individual. Information, resources, and incentives shape what people do before skill, knowledge, or motivation ever enter the picture. This applies to culture as directly as it applies to any other performance problem.

If an organization says it values psychological safety, but its systems route all decisions upward, punish visible failure, and reward whoever speaks most confidently in a meeting regardless of accuracy, the culture that results will look nothing like psychological safety. People will behave according to what the system teaches them, which is that certainty is rewarded and vulnerability is costly.

If an organization says it values collaboration but its incentive structure is built around individual performance metrics, its information systems keep teams siloed, and its resource allocation process is competitive rather than shared, it will get people who are performatively collaborative and privately territorial. The values said one thing. The systems said another. The systems always win.

This is why culture initiatives that operate at the level of communication and aspiration rarely stick. They're trying to change behavior by changing minds, when the behavior is being produced by the structure people are operating inside.

During a culture change initiative, leadership tends to ask: "Do our people believe in our values?”

What they should ask is: "Do our systems make it easy for our people to enact our values?” That’s the shift in focus that turns a culture of lip service to a culture in action.

Pick one stated organizational value. Work through these questions:

If you find gaps in any of these areas, you've found a systems problem. The values aren't wrong. The scaffolding that would let people act on them hasn't been built.

What is my culture rewarding, intentionally or not?

Look at the last six months. Who got recognized? Who got promoted? What behaviors got called out as exemplary? What got tolerated? The answers to those questions describe the culture more accurately than anything written on a wall.