Most companies are managing culture backward.
They decide what kind of culture they want, launch initiatives to build it, measure how employees respond, and then try to prove that any of it mattered to the business.
Here’s what our research crystallizes: Reverse the order.
Start with what the business needs people to do. Then ask whether your culture makes those behaviors possible.
Leaders increasingly expect culture to accelerate AI adoption, strengthen innovation, restore trust, improve collaboration, raise performance, and help employees adapt to constant change. Yet many organizations still cannot say precisely what they mean by “culture,” much less what they need it to do.
We know the problem isn’t that leaders don’t care about culture. Rather, leaders often cannot identify the behaviors their strategy requires or tell whether their organization consistently enables them.
For inclusion and culture leaders, that gap creates an opportunity: Start with a business priority and show where culture is helping or hindering execution. That reframes culture around the question business leaders already care about: Can our workforce do what our strategy requires?
At Seramount, we study culture from both sides of the execution gap: what leaders need their organizations to do and what employees experience when strategy meets daily work. We bring together deep qualitative inquiry with leaders, employee voice data, market intelligence, and foundational and emerging organizational-culture research to identify where intended culture and lived culture diverge and what organizations can do about it.
Drawing on dozens of conversations with inclusion leaders and more than 10,000 employee responses from Seramount’s Employee Voice Sessions, we formulated an approach that led us to five questions leaders can use to determine whether their culture can deliver their strategy.
1. What business outcome does your culture need to enable?
Organizations routinely say they need an innovative culture. An agile culture. A high-performance culture. A culture of trust.
If your culture strategy can be summarized with an adjective, you probably have not finished the strategy.
Innovative enough to accomplish what? Agile in response to which business pressure? Enough trust for employees to do what differently?
Suppose a company needs to get new products to market faster. It may need employees to share unfinished ideas earlier, challenge assumptions, exchange information across functions, experiment without excessive approval, and learn quickly when something fails.
And yet, Seramount’s Employee Voice Sessions reveal that only 41% of employees report feeling comfortable taking risks without fear. That is not simply a psychological-safety statistic. If innovation requires experimentation, it is evidence about whether employees experience the conditions that make that behavior possible.
Too often, organizations introduce values or culture programs without knowing what to measure or why it matters and then ask HR teams to demonstrate business impact afterward.
Instead, identify the outcome the business needs, determine which behaviors will help produce it, and ask whether the organization makes those behaviors possible.
Key point: If you begin with the business problem, you do not have to manufacture the business case for culture afterward.
2. What would people have to do differently for your strategy to work?
Strategy does not execute itself. It becomes real through behavior.
Yet organizations often jump from priorities such as innovation or transformation straight to programs and communications without defining what employees need to do differently.
We define workplace culture as the shared and contested norms and signals through which people learn what behavior is expected, rewarded, tolerated, and safe. It’s the system that guides employees through ambiguity—what employees turn to in times of doubt, frustration, or uncertainty.
Values communicate what an organization hopes will matter. Engagement and sentiment tell leaders something important about employees’ experiences. But none of these sources of insight, on its own, tells leaders what behavior the organization reliably produces.
Consider a company that says it values candor. Culture is not the word candor on the wall. It is what happens after an employee tells a senior leader the plan will not work. Are they heard? Thanked? Labeled as difficult? Excluded from the next important conversation?
Key point: People learn culture from what happens next.
3. What is your organization currently rewarding or making rational?
Once leaders define the behavior they need, a harder question follows: What does our organization currently make logical?
Suppose leaders want collaboration, but promotions reward individual heroics. Information confers status. Functions compete for resources. Decision rights are unclear.
Employees may be behaving perfectly rationally when they protect their own work instead of collaborating across boundaries.
Leaders may want experimentation while failed attempts damage performance reviews. Or they may want speed while requiring layers of approval before a decision can be implemented.
Promotion decisions, incentives, manager behavior, access to information, decision rights, talent systems, and reactions to failure all signal what really matters.
When employees repeatedly behave in ways leaders say they do not want, do not start by trying to change the employees. Start by examining the organization that has supported the behavior—directly or indirectly.
If leaders ask for one behavior while incentivizing another, the problem isn’t resistance. The problem is the design of work.
Key point: Ask “What are we making rational?”
4. Where does that behavior become harder, riskier, or less rewarded?
Even when leaders identify the right behaviors and systems, they can overestimate the capability they have.
A behavior can exist somewhere in an organization without existing reliably enough to call it culture.
If the strategy requires candid challenge, who can safely challenge assumptions or decisions? If innovation depends on experimentation, who has the information, latitude, sponsorship, and relationships to move an idea forward?
Seramount’s Employee Voice Sessions show why those questions matter. White men are nearly twice as likely as women of color to report having someone in their internal network who can take their ideas to the next level. Women of color are also the group least likely to have a sponsor: 56% report having no sponsor at all.
Those gaps are not a side conversation about employee experience. They are evidence about whether the relationships and access a strategy depends on are available broadly enough for the organization to rely on them.
A few well-connected employees moving ideas across silos do not create an innovative organization. One team where people freely challenge assumptions does not create a culture of candor.
Key point: If the behavior your strategy requires works only in pockets, the organization cannot yet rely on it at scale.
5. What evidence would tell you it is working?
Finally, measure culture against the job you asked it to do.
An annual culture score may rise. Employees may report stronger engagement. Both may be welcome.
But did the organization get better at the thing culture was supposed to enable?
Look at three levels:
Condition → Behavior → Business Outcome
If the business needs faster innovation, examine whether employees can challenge assumptions, whether teams are experimenting and sharing information earlier, and whether outcomes such as speed to market or innovation cycle time are improving.
The metrics will vary with the strategy. The discipline should not. Sustained discipline is more useful than relying on a single culture score and trying to infer business value from it.
Key point: Measure whether the condition changed, whether the behavior changed, and whether the business outcome the organization intended to influence moved with them.
Stop asking whether your culture is strong
Your organization probably does not lack culture data. You likely have values, engagement surveys, leadership competencies, talent metrics, performance data, and employee listening.
What you may lack is a way to connect them.
Can you identify what the business needs people to do, what the organization is teaching them to do instead, where the required behavior becomes harder across the workforce, and what evidence would tell you it is changing?
If not, you still cannot see clearly enough how your culture works.
Stop asking only one question: Do we have a strong culture?
Ask instead: What does our business need people to do next, and what will it take to make that behavior possible here?
That is how culture becomes a capability for delivering strategy.
We’ll be sharing more from this research in the months ahead. Join us in New York this November for the research debut, where we’ll share the full findings, implications, and practical tools for putting this framework into action.
Not a partner yet? We’ll preview selected findings in Washington, DC, including key signals on culture, inclusion, and business performance.
