Why culture should be managed like a core business function

For years, organizations have talked about culture as if it were a collection of perks. Combine the espresso machines, ping-pong tables and open-floor concepts with fancy posters about values and beliefs, and magically, the desired culture should follow. But those things don’t build a culture—they merely decorate it. In today’s landscape, the question isn’t whether your organization can afford to invest in culture; it’s whether you can afford not to.

The real culture of an organization lives in the collective ways of thinking, or mindsets, that influence behavior, affect how people work together, and drive results. When leaders treat culture as something intentionally designed, measured and managed, it becomes one of the strongest predictors of long-term performance.

Hybrid work, GenAI, and rapidly shifting employee expectations are widening the gap between an organization’s espoused culture and its lived experiences. When that gap continues to grow, engagement erodes, alignment weakens and performance follows.

At its best, culture is an operating system for how people work together to achieve outcomes and shared goals. It’s the framework that fuels trust, collaboration, and innovation. Culture should be viewed the same way we think about any core business capability or function: It requires design, measurement and ongoing optimization.

Culture starts with collective thinking

There are countless definitions of culture. I’ve heard it described as values, beliefs, rituals and even behaviors. But the simplest and most actionable way to describe it is provided by Chad Carr and Matt Herzberg in their book The Art and Science of Culture.

Culture is the collective thinking that creates the states of mind and actions that produce results in an organization.

If you want people to behave differently, you must first help them think differently. And if you want the organization to move in a specific direction, those ways of thinking must be shared, aligned with your strategy and reinforced consistently.

That’s why culture, leadership and talent are inseparable. They are the three forces that make strategy real: Talent provides capability. Culture provides a shared mindset. Leadership provides alignment and accountability.

You can have the best strategy in the world, but without shared thinking, you’ll never execute it.

How to make culture actionable

When I stepped into my role at RGA, one of the first things I wanted to understand was how people perceived our culture versus how it needed to function in order to support our strategy.

I asked leaders to draw a line down a sheet of paper. On the left side, they listed words that defined the company at its best, where it was aligned with how we needed to execute the strategy. On the right side, they listed words that reflected where our culture felt misaligned with how we needed to execute the strategy. Not right or wrong, good or bad—rather, aligned or misaligned.

The results were honest and remarkably consistent, and these insights helped us define what we now call the winning mindset. We refer to this winning mindset as the shared ways of thinking and how we guide decision-making, collaboration and problem-solving.

Our winning mindset is built on four tenets:

1. Enterprise first—Optimize for the whole, not just your team.
2. Seek the truth—Collaborate openly and honestly; say what needs to be said and listen actively.
3. Progress over perfection—Don’t let the fear of making a mistake keep you from moving swiftly.
4. Embrace change—To stay competitive, you must be willing to adapt.

These aren’t just posters on the wall. They are the models that leaders and teams use every day. Because culture is role-modeled from the top, we embed these mindsets into expectations, conversations and performance frameworks. Leaders get what they role-model, tolerate and reward.

Leadership: Make it simple, tangible and judgment-free

One of the biggest misconceptions about cultural change is that it requires a massive overhaul. In reality, the biggest shifts often start small. You can change culture as quickly as you can change thinking … and that can happen in one conversation.

I like to use this baseball analogy with my team and fellow leaders: The average batting average of a Major League Baseball (MLB) player is about .270, which is considered good, but in reality, they’re far from perfect. The average batting average of a Hall of Fame MLB player is about .300. The difference between average and world-class is only 300 basis points. Small, repeatable improvements can have a huge difference in a game, a season, and a career.

Culture works the same way. If every leader gets just a little better at living the winning mindset, the collective impact is transformative. But we must remove judgment. Leaders can’t practice or improve if they fear being wrong. The goal isn’t perfection, but rather consistent, progressive improvement.

Measuring culture

Culture can be confusing and overly defined. The key is tracking whether the way we think and work together is actually changing.

We focus on properties of a winning mindset and look for indicators that show those mindsets are being lived:

• Observable—Faster decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, more innovative ideas.
• Experiential—Employees feeling valued, teams feeling empowered, leaders acting with clarity.
• Outcomes—Stronger deals, better client results, improved business performance.

We use a combination of tools to measure engagement. We have employee engagement surveys, pulse check surveys and recognition platforms that reward these mindsets and actions. Surveys alone don’t “define” culture, but they help us see whether the way people think and act together is shifting in the right direction.

Culture isn’t new—making it actionable is

Organizations don’t need another definition of culture. What they need is a way to make it real, repeatable and measurable. The more leaders treat culture as a capability, the more it accelerates everything else. The moment you clarify that changing culture boils down to changing thinking and then link that to clear leader accountability—leaders get what they role-model, tolerate, and reward—then culture is actionable.

I predict that the organizations that will win over the next decade won’t be the ones with the most perks; they’ll be the ones with the most aligned mindsets. They’ll think together, act together, and win together.

Culture isn’t a perk. It’s a performance system. And it might be the most actionable strategy you have.

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