Stop Winging It: How to Actually Build Company Culture That Works

I've watched countless organizations struggle with culture, and the problem always starts in the same place: nobody can actually define what culture is. Ask ten executives and you'll get ten different answers. Some think it's about ping pong tables and free snacks. Others believe it's the mission statement hanging in the lobby. Most are just crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

Here's what I've learned after years of building teams and watching others succeed or fail: culture isn't magic. It's not something that just happens organically. Culture is simply the collection of behaviors that get modeled, rewarded, and encouraged in your organization. That's it. It's how work actually gets done, not how you wish it would get done.

The Family Analogy That Changed My Perspective

You wouldn't wing raising a family, would you? You wouldn't just shrug and say, "I hope these relationships work out somehow." Families function better when parents are intentional about how they treat each other, what behaviors they model, and what they encourage.

The same is true for organizational culture. You can't just hope it works out. You have to build it deliberately, with intention, with a clear theory of how you want people to behave and why.

Why Most Culture Efforts Fail

I've seen so many well-meaning leaders try to tackle culture with inspirational posters and team-building retreats. They spend thousands on consultants who facilitate workshops about "values." Then they go back to work and nothing changes because they never addressed the fundamental question: what specific behaviors will help us achieve our goals?

Culture isn't about having the "right" values in some abstract sense. It's about identifying the behaviors that will make you successful in your specific context, then making those behaviors stick.

Let me give you an example. Some companies need urgency as a core value. They're in competitive markets where speed matters, where customers expect immediate responses, where hesitation means losing deals. For them, urgency isn't just nice to have—it's survival.

But other companies operate in contexts where deliberation and careful consideration are what win. They're making decisions with long-term consequences, dealing with safety-critical systems, or working in highly regulated environments. For them, rushing would be disaster.

Neither approach is inherently better. The key is aligning your cultural behaviors with your strategic reality.

My Framework for Making Culture Stick

After trying various approaches and watching others succeed and fail, I developed a systematic way to activate culture. I call it my five-step approach, though really it's more like a dynamic system where everything happens simultaneously.

First comes alignment. This is where most organizations skip ahead too quickly, but it's the foundation of everything else. You have to get crystal clear on what behaviors will actually drive your success. Don't pick values because they sound nice or because you saw them work somewhere else. Pick them because they're what you need to win.

Then come four actions that happen continuously: walk, talk, celebrate, and enforce.

Talk: Make It Impossible to Ignore

You have to talk about your values constantly. Not in a cheesy, corporate-speak way, but in real conversations about real work. When someone demonstrates the behavior you want, point it out. When a situation calls for a particular value, name it explicitly.

I learned this the hard way when I realized that most of my team couldn't actually tell you what our values were if you woke them up at 3 AM and asked. That's a problem. If people can't articulate what you stand for, they can't live it.

The best teams I've built were ones where values became part of our everyday vocabulary. We'd say things like, "This is a perfect example of our collaboration value in action," or "This situation really calls for our urgency value—how do we move faster here?"

Walk: Actions Speak Louder Than Posters

Here's where most leadership teams destroy their credibility: they talk about values they don't actually demonstrate. I promise you, people are watching. They're taking notes. They're talking about you behind your back when you fail to walk your own talk.

If you say collaboration is important but then make unilateral decisions without input, people notice. If you preach urgency but then take weeks to respond to your team's requests, they see the hypocrisy.

Walking your values as a leader isn't just about being consistent—it's about showing people what these behaviors actually look like in practice. You're the example they'll follow.

Celebrate: Make Good Behavior Visible and Valuable

This is where I see the biggest missed opportunities. Most organizations are terrible at celebrating the behaviors they want to see more of. They notice when people mess up, but they let good examples pass by without comment.

I've learned that celebration needs to be public and, when possible, financial. If someone demonstrates your values in a meaningful way, don't just send them a private thank-you email. Make a big deal about it. Tell the story in team meetings. If you can, show appreciation in their bonus or raise.

When you celebrate someone for living your values, you're not just rewarding them—you're teaching everyone else what good looks like. You're showing people that this behavior matters enough to invest in.

Enforce: The Hardest Part That Makes or Breaks Everything

Here's the part most leaders avoid, and it's why their culture efforts fail. You have to be willing to have difficult conversations when people don't demonstrate your values. You have to enforce the standards you've set.

Sometimes enforcement means coaching. "Hey, in that meeting we talked about collaboration being important, but you dominated the conversation and didn't give others a chance to contribute. Let's talk about how to do that differently next time."

Sometimes enforcement means harder conversations about whether someone is a good fit. I've had to tell people that while they might be successful elsewhere, their approach doesn't align with how we work here.

This is the make-or-break moment for culture. If you let values violations slide, you're teaching everyone that the values don't actually matter. You're showing them that the posters on the wall are just decoration.

The Dynamic System in Action

The magic happens when all four of these actions work together. You're simultaneously talking about values, demonstrating them, celebrating them, and enforcing them. It becomes a reinforcing cycle where the culture strengthens itself.

I've seen this work in teams of ten people and organizations of thousands. The scale doesn't matter—the principles do. When people see values being lived at every level, when they hear about them regularly, when they're rewarded for demonstrating them, and when there are consequences for ignoring them, culture becomes the fabric of how work gets done.

The Long Game

Building real culture takes time. It's not a quarterly initiative or an annual retreat theme. It's a daily practice that compounds over months and years. But when you get it right, you don't have to manage people as much because they're managing themselves according to shared principles.

You also get something else that's invaluable: the ability to scale. When your culture is strong, new people learn how to operate in your organization not just from their manager, but from everyone around them. The culture becomes self-reinforcing.

Stop hoping your culture will work out. Stop winging it. Be intentional about the behaviors that will make you successful, then build a system to make those behaviors stick. Your team—and your results—will thank you for it.