Many people mistake building culture for surface-level perks, such as the flexibility to work three days a week, casual dress codes, or having a manager who avoids challenging team members. While these aspects can improve the work environment, they don’t define an organization’s culture. Culture isn’t about memorizing a company’s mission statement or core values plastered on the wall. It’s also not intended to make everyone happy or to eliminate discomfort entirely. In fact, the most effective organizational cultures set high standards and expectations that often push people beyond their comfort zones.

What Culture Isn’t

The perks we often see in modern workplaces—such as sleep pods, free snacks, and gym memberships—don’t represent what culture is. They’re simply beneficial perks. While they can enhance the employee experience, confusing perks with the process of building culture often leads to misplaced priorities. In my 13 years of management consulting and advisory work, I’ve seen this misunderstanding derail countless efforts to build a thriving workplace with organizations of all sizes.

This isn’t to imply organizations shouldn’t strive to offer the best perks for their employees; it simply doesn’t capture the true essence of culture. Perks might create temporary satisfaction, yet they don’t automatically build a resilient and high-performing culture. Recognizing this distinction is crucial to understanding culture’s true essence. Confusing perks with culture is a path that often leads many organizations astray.

Culture as Behavior at Scale

So, what is culture exactly? At its core, culture is behavior at scale—the collective actions, mindsets, and decisions of people across an organization. It’s not just how team members behave when their manager is watching; it’s how they show up when no one’s looking.

Effectively building culture influences how people perceive their roles, interact with others, and approach their work on a daily basis. Consider this: on Sunday evening, do your team members dread Monday, or are they genuinely excited to contribute? These subtle, unspoken feelings reveal the true essence of your culture. It’s not about what’s written in a company handbook; it’s about what’s lived and felt every day.

Culture’s Role in Driving Excellence

Culture is the heartbeat of organizational excellence. Many leaders invest heavily in developing strategic plans but then neglect to consider the behaviors required to execute them. Culture acts as a link between strategic objectives and daily actions, propelling organizations towards excellence.

Transformational leaders understand that culture isn’t an afterthought but the foundation that supports everything else. The heartbeat of any thriving organization is its culture. Without a strong cultural backbone, strategy remains just a plan.

Engaging Hearts and Minds

Culture does more than drive execution, though. It connects with people on a deeper level, engaging their hearts and minds. While data and performance metrics play a role, they rarely spark the kind of passion or enthusiasm that truly ignites people outside a select few high-performing self-starters.

What inspires people is having a total understanding of their role in the organization’s vision and how their daily work contributes to the bigger picture. This clarity of purpose is what building culture helps instill, driving engagement and enthusiasm across all levels of an organization.

Driving Alignment and Organizational Success

A strong culture drives alignment across all business units and teams. Despite their differing responsibilities, everyone must clearly understand how their work contributes to the organization’s overall objectives. In such thriving cultures, every division collaborates, rowing in unison toward a shared destination.

Building culture isn’t just a component of organizational excellence—it’s the core driver. Culture isn’t about temporary emotional highs induced by perks but the sustainable fulfillment of knowing one’s part within a greater whole. For leaders, nurturing and sustaining a strong culture is essential for achieving excellence.

For deeper insights and actionable strategies for building culture, explore my Wall Street Journal bestseller, Culture Is the Way—a guide to building thriving, high-performing organizations.

The post Beyond Perks: Building a Culture That Drives Success appeared first on Matt Mayberry.

Throughout my speech, I shared a vision that transcends daily operations or industry buzzwords. I talked about a truth many of us feel deep down but struggle to articulate—every employee wants to belong to an organizational culture that brings out their best. And it’s the role of leaders at every level to create and continually build that type of organizational culture.

What Makes a Winning Organizational Culture

Over the years, I’ve drawn much inspiration from the best coaches in professional sports, primarily in football. Their job aligns closely with ours as organizational leaders—they must unite diverse individuals, instill discipline, and sustain high performance over a period of time. From their successes, I distilled three principles that all business leaders can take away from them in terms of building a winning organizational culture:

1. Foster a Burning Desire to Improve Culture. Culture isn’t a box to check. Building and maintaining it is a lifelong endeavor, requiring relentless commitment from leadership. It’s about daily investments, not sporadic campaigns.
2. Coach, Don’t Just Manage. Employees crave mentorship, not micromanagement. A coach provides feedback, challenges potential, and celebrates growth. It’s about empowering people to thrive both as professionals and as individuals.
3. Generate Positive Energy. Leadership sets the tone. The energy we bring to work each day directly impacts everyone around us. Positivity isn’t just feel-good fluff—it’s a driving force behind creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

I shared stories of leaders—ordinary people with extraordinary drive—bringing these principles to life in their organizations.

Why Culture Is Non-Negotiable

The statistics are sobering, and I highlighted them to underscore the urgency of this conversation. Nearly $8.9 trillion is lost in global GDP due to low engagement. To put that in perspective, 62% of the workforce admits to being disconnected from their roles, while over 50% are actively looking for new opportunities.

This data illustrates the stakes. Disengagement doesn’t just hurt morale—it erodes innovation, productivity, and the ability to retain top talent. At its core, most disengagement stems from the lack of a defined and meaningful organizational culture.

Here’s the good news. Creating such a culture doesn’t require unlimited resources or monumental changes. It begins with a commitment to actions that foster purpose, community, and connection. Employees don’t want to feel like cogs in a machine. They want to be part of something greater, to have leaders who walk alongside them, and to have their strengths celebrated rather than their weaknesses magnified.

Common Myths About Organizational Culture

Throughout the keynote, I challenged widely held assumptions. Organizational culture isn’t about trendy perks or casual dress codes. It’s not “rah-rah” mission statements or empty commitments. And it’s not about making everyone happy.

True organizational culture goes much deeper. It’s about shared beliefs, purposeful behaviors, and creating experiences that inspire people to become the best version of themselves.

A Practical Framework for Building Exceptional Culture

To make the abstract more actionable, I offered the audience a five-step framework to create a world-class organizational culture that endures over time. This approach isn’t just theoretical—it’s based on a decade of experience partnering with organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

1. Define. First, gain clarity by designing the environment you envision. Write a Cultural Purpose Statement (CPS), a guiding mantra that aligns the team.
2. Discover. Build trust and psychological safety by seeking feedback from your people. What’s working? What needs improvement? Listening is one thing, but responding with action is where transformation begins.
3. Launch. Culture is not an announcement; it’s a marathon. Consistently cascade and embed the vision across every touchpoint.
4. Impact. Treat culture as a foundation, not a standalone initiative. Resist the urge to check a box and move on. The goal is sustained impact over time.
5. Lead. The secret sauce of every successful culture is leadership. Exemplary leaders embody the behaviors they wish to see, creating alignment that drives execution.

The Ultimate Differentiator

To close the keynote, I left the audience with this thought: in its most simplistic form, organizational culture is behavior at scale. The way your teams operate behind closed doors, the passion they bring to their daily work, the alignment of their hearts and minds—this is culture in its truest sense. And it’s the number one determinant of an organization’s ability to thrive.

Building and sustaining organizational culture is not a luxury; it’s a business necessity. When leaders earnestly invest in their people, define their culture, and commit to cultural excellence, the rewards are transformational. Think higher engagement, stronger retention, and teams brimming with creative energy, driving consistent results.

Leadership is the ultimate differentiator. Leaders, at their best, inspire individuals to pursue greatness within an organizational culture that makes it possible.

Culture is the way forward. It’s time to step up, build something extraordinary, and lead with intent.

If you’re ready to elevate your organization’s culture, we’d love to help you on that journey. Reach out, and together, we can build a foundation that drives speed, impact, and excellence.

The post Change Organizational Culture, Change Your Future appeared first on Matt Mayberry.

The performance and effectiveness of a company’s leaders are the ultimate differentiators, as I explain in Chapter 10 of my new Wall Street Journal bestseller, Culture Is the Way. Particularly when focusing on developing, shaping, and driving cultural excellence. Although there are many factors that contribute to shaping workplace culture, there is no doubt that it begins with leaders paving the way and setting the standard.

Understand the Importance of Workplace Culture

At its core, workplace culture is characterized by large-scale behavior. It is essential to organizational excellence. The core. The energy. It is at the forefront for leaders who want to improve performance and strategic alignment. Workplace culture is the heart and soul of any organization. Regardless of what a leader claims their workplace culture is, the determining factor is the collective mindsets, repeated efforts and actions, and consistent results experienced within and outside the organization.

Employee engagement, output, and retention can all benefit from a positive workplace culture, while high turnover, low morale, and low output are potential consequences of a toxic work environment. As a leader, you must recognize the importance of cultivating a positive and supportive work environment for your team and take action to do so. It takes time and effort, but one of the most important things a leader can do is build a productive and positive workplace culture. When the culture changes for the better, everything else benefits.

Lead by Example

Leading the charge is one of the most important ways for leaders to shape workplace culture. This entails modeling the attitudes and behaviors you want to see in your team. If you want your team to prioritize coaching, for example, make sure you are actively coaching others and encouraging team members to do the same. You can create a culture that supports and then adopts the values and behaviors you want to see in your team by demonstrating those values and behaviors. One of the most prominent problems when it comes to strengthening or changing workplace culture is leaders declaring a course of action without backing it up with their actions. I’ve seen this happen thousands of times in real time.

Everything leaders do, from how they treat others to how they behave and think, quickly circulates within the four walls of an organization, whether they are aware of it or not.

Recognize and Reward Positive Behaviors

In addition to modeling and leading by example, leaders should recognize and reward positive behaviors in their team members. It is critical to catch others doing the right thing when building workplace culture. Why bother recognizing behaviors team members should be doing is a dangerous but often adopted perspective among leaders. During my football career, the best coaches I ever had were tough on me and consistently challenged me, but even the smallest details would be recognized and called out when I did something right. Especially if they were trying to break a bad habit. This not only increased my self-confidence over time, but it also made me more susceptible to tougher coaching and accountability.

The act of simply saying thank you or giving a shout-out in a group setting can go a long way toward encouraging and rewarding positive actions. It may also include more formal recognition programs, such as employee of the month awards or bonuses for team members who exemplify workplace culture standards in exceptional ways. By recognizing and rewarding positive behaviors, leaders can reinforce the values and behaviors they desire to see in their team and foster an environment of positivity and excellence.

Do you want to find out more about building a world-class culture? Get a copy of my new book, Culture Is the Way. You will learn a five-step process for building an organization for speed, impact, and excellence.

The post Workplace Culture: Leadership’s Role appeared first on Matt Mayberry.