I spent an hour this week with a senior executive who wants to change his company’s culture.
He is serious, and he has both the budget and CEO’s backing. His company has already been through one culture initiative that generated good thinking and dialogue, but it didn’t stick.
Four separate times he asked me for essentially the same thing: a playbook, a template, or an outline his team could work from. It was a reasonable request.
I told him that there isn’t a universal playbook because there isn’t a universal culture problem.
Anyone who tells you that they already know how to fix your culture before they’ve examined it is selling certainty, but not truth.
Almost everything else in a company can be written down without losing anything: pricing logic, a safety protocol, a month-end close. Culture does not move that way. A document records what leadership intends to do. But employees judge the company by what it actually did. Every organization makes decisions that match its values when the choice is free. The decisions that carry information are the ones where the standard got in the way. You have not changed your culture until living your values has cost you something you wanted.
You have not changed your culture until living your values has cost you something you wanted.
Ask most executives how to make culture change stick and the answer is usually more communication: another town hall or a refreshed values deck. Communication matters, but it is not what sustains culture.
What makes culture durable is seeing the same standard showing up in decision after decision, including the expensive and difficult ones. I’m speaking of hiring choices, promotion discussions, performance reviews, resource allocation, and disciplinary actions.
Edgar Schein, whose work did more than anyone else’s to define the study of organizational culture, ranked the ways leaders transmit it. The mechanisms he called primary are all decisions and reactions: what a leader measures, how a leader responds to a crisis, where resources go, who gets rewarded, and who gets hired, promoted, and removed. Formal values statements sit in his second tier, and he found that they work only when they match the first. Change programs fail, he observed, when a leader changes the speeches and the values statement but leaves the promotion criteria, the rewards, and the budget where they were.
That’s why assessment comes before a playbook or action plan.
Until we know what an organization rewards today, we cannot know which systems need to change: whether hiring undermines collaboration, whether incentives pay for the wrong behavior, or whether the review process is still scoring against a standard the business has outgrown. The data tells us which ones to change first.
Your company already runs many of these systems on a calendar. KPI and bonus targets get set in the first weeks of the year. Individual development plans, promotion decisions, and talent reviews all sit at fixed points in the cycle. Mid-year and year-end evaluations put a number on performance attached to a story. Those meetings happen whether or not anyone in the room is thinking about culture, and each one teaches employees what the organization values.
Between those formal checkpoints sit the smaller repetitions that often matter more.
A team meeting where the discussion stays on the problem instead of the person who owns it, coaching a direct report when ignoring an issue would have been easier, or demoting someone respectfully, with clear performance reports and documented expectations, so that everyone watching understands that the standard is about the work rather than popularity.
Sometimes the bill comes due in public. Someone stands up during a town hall and asks the question everyone has been asking privately for months. What happens in the next fifteen seconds carries more weight than an entire values rollout. An honest and possibly incomplete answer builds credibility. A redirect, a joke at the asker’s expense, or a reminder about “appropriate channels” teaches something very different. Four hundred people just learned the operating rule, and nobody needed a memo to understand it.
James Detert and Ethan Burris, in research published in the Academy of Management Journal, found that employees raise concerns far more readily when leaders consistently show openness to hearing them. The effect was strongest among the best performers, whose willingness to speak tracked their manager’s openness more closely than anyone else’s. The town hall non-answer does not silence a room evenly. It takes your strongest people out of the conversation first.
The town hall non-answer does not silence a room evenly. It takes your strongest people out of the conversation first.
The second bill arrives from the field. A new process goes out, and within a few weeks the people running it report that it adds steps without improving results and does not survive contact with a customer. That feedback is the most valuable that leadership gets all year. It also arrives at the moment leadership is least willing to receive it, because the rollout has already been announced.
Adjust the process, and employees learn that results outrank the appearance of alignment.
Insist on following the playbook as written, and they learn that compliance is the real objective.
In my experience the moments that shape culture most enduringly have almost no audience.
I am working currently with a leader who had to tell a long-tenured direct report that his performance no longer matched what the role requires. Delivering it as a verdict would have been faster and safer for him. He ran it as a conversation instead, specific about the gap and about what closing it would take, and clear that he believed the employee could close it. They were the only two people in the room.
The direct report told others what happened. One conversation with a single witness changed what an entire team expects when a message is hard: specifics, respect, and a route back to the standard. That is the version of this that works, and the only thing it cost was the discomfort of having it.
The executive who asked me for a culture playbook wasn’t wrong to ask. He was asking too early.
Before you spend anything more on culture work, look back over last quarter and find one decision where living your stated values cost your organization something: the candidate you passed on despite staffing pressure, the producer you chose not to promote, the rollout you rewrote because the field proved it was not working. If you cannot find one, the values are not operating yet. And no playbook will change that. At the next promotion decision or talent review, write down the standard before you walk into the room. Be clear about who it disqualifies.
If you cannot find one, the values are not operating yet. And no playbook will change that.
If you would like a second set of eyes on that standard before the next cycle, you can reach me here. Schedule a Meeting with Richard Smith
Richard A. Smith is the Founder and Managing Partner of Benton + Bradford Consulting, a leadership advisory firm serving Fortune 500 executives and senior leaders. He brings more than two decades of Fortune 500 operational leadership, including roles at Walmart, Terex, INROADS, and Bell Oaks Executive Search. His advisory work is assessment-led and data-backed: he learns the business first, then diagnoses whether the gap sits in the leader or in the culture, and closes it.
