“Fix the culture, fix the outcomes.†I say this often (and I've written about it before). It's even my signature line when I do Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business book signings.
Occasionally someone pushes back and says that the saying is too simplistic or that culture isn't something you can actually fix. They're right about one thing: culture isn't a switch you just flip or a slogan you roll out, but culture absolutely can be changed, deliberately and systematically.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ~ The Princess Bride
The problem is that most organizations misunderstand both halves of the phrase. They misunderstand what it means to fix the culture, and they misunderstand what it means to fix the outcomes.
So they spend enormous energy trying to fix outcomes: growth targets, engagement scores, customer metrics, innovation pipelines. They launch initiatives, redesign processes, invest in new technology, and reorganize teams.
But when the culture producing those outcomes remains unchanged, the results rarely move very far – and rarely stick.
That's why the phrase matters. So let's put some real clarity behind it.
What It Means to Fix the Culture
“Fixing the culture†means deliberately reshaping the environment that drives how work actually gets done. It requires leaders to align what they say matters with what they consistently reinforce through attention, decisions, incentives, accountability, and learning.
When leaders clarify expectations, reward the right behaviors, refuse to tolerate conduct that undermines values, empower people to make decisions close to the work, and actively learn from employees and customers, the day-to-day behaviors of the organization begin to change.
In practical terms, fixing the culture means creating a system in which trust, collaboration, ownership, and customer awareness become the normal way people operate, not because they were told to but because the organization's structures and signals make those behaviors the obvious choice.
Remember: Culture isn't defined by posters, core values alone, or employee engagement campaigns. Culture is defined by how the organization actually operates. Specifically, culture is shaped by a handful of forces that leaders control whether they realize it or not. (Recall, you get the culture you design or the one you allow.)
Yes, culture = core values + behaviors. But those actions and behaviors truly dictate and drive the culture that is created, allowed, and sustained. So, be sure to (a) identify and define the core values; (b) define the behaviors associated with each value; (c) socialize both core values and behaviors; and (d) operationalize the same.
Culture is the system of signals that tells people how work actually gets done. Here are some specifics.
What leaders consistently pay attention to
What leaders ask and talk about becomes what people deem important and, thus, prioritize.
- If leaders ask about quarterly numbers, people focus on quarterly numbers.
- If leaders ask about customers and employees, people focus there.
And that's directly related to the next concept.
What gets rewarded and recognized
Organizations don't get the behaviors they encourage; they get the behaviors they reward. If collaboration is praised but individual performance is promoted, the culture won't become collaborative.
Recognition programs reveal the real culture faster than mission statements ever will. And when someone is promoted, the announcement itself is a culture signal.
- If the announcement is generic (“Jane has been a tremendous contributorâ€), you've wasted a culture moment.
- If it's specific (“Jane is being promoted because she rebuilt the relationship with our largest client after it nearly collapsed, and she did it by involving her whole team rather than with heroicsâ€), you've just published the operating manual.
What behavior gets tolerated
This one is non-negotiable. Culture erodes when leaders allow behavior that contradicts the organization's values. One high-performing executive who's allowed to ignore the rules can undo years of culture-building progress.
Every time a leader tolerates bad behavior from a high performer, they're effectively communicating: results purchase exemption from our values. That message spreads fast and sticks hard.
What leaders tolerate becomes the culture. Full stop.
How decisions are made
Decision-making processes (and the basis for those decisions) quietly shape culture every day.
- Do leaders make decisions close to the work, or does everything climb the hierarchy?
- Do employees have the authority to solve problems, or must they escalate everything?
Decision structures create either empowerment or bureaucracy. Decisions need to be made through the lens of the core values.
What stories get told
Stories are how culture gets transmitted without anyone intending to transmit it. They travel through onboarding conversations, lunch tables, and all-hands Q&As. The problem is that the stories that travel fastest are usually stories of failure, injustice, or exception because those are emotionally charged.
Leaders who understand culture as narrative don't just tell good stories; they actively retire bad or damaging ones. If the dominant culture story is “remember when leadership changed the comp plan mid-year and screwed everyone,†that story is doing active damage every time it's told. You can't delete it. You can only replace it with something more recent and more powerful.
Do a story audit or inventory.
- What are the five stories that new employees hear in their first 90 days?
- Are those the stories you'd choose?
- If not, what would you replace them with, and how do you create the conditions for those stories to exist?
Whether employees can speak up
Psychological safety is is one of the most misunderstood concepts in organizational life. Safety isn't about making people comfortable. It's about making it safe to say the hard thing, name the real problem, push back on the plan.
The operational test for psychological safety isn't whether people say they feel safe on a survey. In a psychologically safe culture, problems surface early when they're still solvable. In an unsafe one, they surface late, after they've compounded.
Leaders must manage their own reactions to bad (or any) news. If they visibly punish the messenger (not necessarily formally, but through body language, tone, or other treatment later), they've closed the channel. People are watching how they handle the first few hard truths, and they're making lifetime decisions about what to bring forward in the future.
Whether organizations actually learn from employees and customers
Organizations that stop learning eventually start guessing. Employees know where processes break. Customers know where experiences fail. Cultures that consistently learn, from both employees and customers, become adaptive; those that don't become disconnected from reality.
Fixing the Culture Summarized
So, clearly, fixing the culture means deliberately shaping all of these forces, not with slogans but with leadership behavior and operational discipline sustained over time. For most organizations, meaningful culture shifts take 18 to 36 months of consistent signal changes – not a quarter, not a reorg, not a new set of values plastered on a conference room wall.
One more thing worth saying: leaders can't do this alone. Middle managers are the transmission system for culture in any large organization. They're caught between the signals coming from above and the work happening below. If middle managers aren't bought in and equipped, the most well-intentioned culture work stalls at the director level and never reaches the people who actually do the work.
What If You Think You're Already Fixing It?
Here's the trap that doesn't get talked about enough: the leaders who are most resistant to culture work are rarely the ones who dismiss it but the ones who believe they're already doing it. Unfortunately, that belief, while confident, well-intentioned, and often completely disconnected from reality, is one of the most stubborn obstacles in organizational life.
So before you move on, it's worth asking honestly: How would you know if you were wrong?
- Intent doesn't equal signal. A leader can genuinely believe she's building a collaborative culture while her promotion decisions, budget allocations, and meeting behaviors are broadcasting something else entirely. The culture doesn't care what you intend. It responds to what you do – consistently, visibly, and over time. If you say collaboration matters but individual heroics are what actually get rewarded, your people figured that out long before you did.
- Survey scores aren't the truth. High engagement scores in a culture that punishes honesty don't mean people are engaged. They mean people have learned not to be honest on surveys. I've seen this all too often. When psychological safety is low, employees become skilled at telling leaders what leaders want to hear, including on the very instruments designed to measure how safe they feel. If your scores are consistently high, but your best people keep leaving or problems keep surfacing late, your data is lying to you. More precisely: your culture is producing data that protects itself.
- Leaders consistently over-estimate their culture. This isn't an opinion but a pattern that shows up across industries and various organization sizes. Leaders rate the health of their culture significantly higher than the employees living inside it do. (I wrote about this Culture Perception Gap in 2019.) The gap between executive perception and frontline reality is one of the most reliable findings in organizational research. If you haven't specifically sought out the view from the middle and the bottom of the organization, not through a survey but through direct and unfiltered conversation, you are, by definition, working with incomplete information.
- Talking about values is not the same as operationalizing them. Many leaders conflate the two. They've done the offsite. They've laminated the values. They can recite the behaviors associated with each one. And then they go back to making decisions, tolerating conduct, and rewarding performance in exactly the ways they always have. Socialization without operationalization is just decoration. The question is never whether people know the values. The question is whether the values show up in how the organization actually makes decisions, allocates resources, and treats people when it's hard to do the right thing.
The uncomfortable truth is that a culture in trouble rarely announces itself clearly to the people at the top. It protects them from that information because the people who have that information have already learned it isn't safe to share it. Which means the leaders most in need of a culture wake-up call are often the last ones to get it.
So if you're reading this and thinking, “We're actually in pretty good shape,†well, that reaction is worth some self-reflection. Not because you're necessarily wrong but because that's exactly what it feels like from inside a culture that has a problem.
How to Trace Outcomes Back to Culture
Before we get to what it means to fix the outcomes, we need to talk about how to connect the two because this is where most organizations get it wrong.
When a bad outcome occurs, the instinct is to fix the outcome directly: adjust the process, replace the person, add a new tool. But recurring, systemic problems rarely have tactical roots. They have cultural ones.
Good outcome tracing works backwards through a demanding chain:
Result → Behavior → System → Belief → Culture
Here's a concrete example of what that looks like. Say a product launched six months late. The naive read is execution failure, but the traced read looks like this:
- What behavior produced the delay? Engineers didn't escalate scope creep for two months.
- What system produced that behavior? Status reporting rewarded green lights regardless of reality.
- What belief produced that system? Leaders wanted confidence, not accuracy, and everyone knew it.
- What cultural norm produced that belief? People who raised problems got labeled “not solutions-oriented.â€
Now you're looking at a culture problem, not an execution problem. The fix is different. The timeline is different. And the lever you pull is different.
One important caveat: not every bad outcome is a culture problem. The test is whether the outcome is recurring and systemic rather than isolated and situational. A one-time project failure may just be a bad project, but five consecutive ones are telling you something about the environment that produced them.
What It Means to Fix the Outcomes
Fixing the outcomes means producing materially better results because the culture that generates those results has improved. It's not the other way around.
When culture improves, several things begin to happen almost immediately:
Those shifts show up in the results leaders ultimately care about: higher employee retention, stronger customer loyalty, faster innovation, more reliable execution, and better financial performance.
This is the point most leaders miss. They treat outcomes as the thing to pull on directly. But outcomes are downstream, and culture is the engine. A weak culture quietly undermines even the best strategies. A strong culture accelerates them. When the engine is finally working the way it should, sustainable performance improvement isn't a goal; it's a byproduct.
The Leadership Choice
Most organizations try to improve outcomes by adjusting tactics. They tweak processes, add tools, and launch new initiatives. And when those things don't stick, they do it again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But if the culture producing the outcomes remains unchanged, the results won't improve for long. That's not cynical. That's math.
The real work of leadership isn't simply setting strategy; it's shaping the culture that determines whether the strategy succeeds.
Leadership Signals → Culture Behaviors → Business Outcomes
Culture isn't a mystery. It's the predictable result of leadership signals.
If you want to know what your culture actually is – right now, not aspirationally – here's a simple diagnostic:
- What do leaders consistently ask about and talk about?
- What behaviors get rewarded and promoted?
- What behavior gets tolerated?
- Where and how are decisions really made?
- How often do we learn directly from employees and customers?
The answers reveal the culture. And that culture will determine the outcomes your organization produces.
In Closing
The Golden Thread connecting organizational culture, employee experience, customer experience, and business outcomes is real and runs in one direction. I've always believed that culture is the foundation; it truly is. Outcomes don't happen because you wish for them to or because of those tactics I referred to earlier. You can't forget the means to achieve the outcomes; too many leaders do.
Culture changes only when leaders consistently alter the signals that shape behavior: what they prioritize, reward, tolerate, decide, talk about, and learn from. When those signals change, culture follows. When they don't, culture stays exactly the same.
Bottom line (and this is critical): Most organizations try to fix results. The organizations that win fix the culture producing those results.
Fix the culture, fix the outcomes.
In an upcoming article, I'll write about the feedback loop that clearly ties these two together and what it looks like when organizations finally get it right.
Culture is the underlying foundation of how we think, behave, and react. ~ Cristina Ho
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