Company culture becomes difficult to manage when it exists mainly as language.
A value such as “innovation,” “ownership,” “customer focus” or “integrity” can sound clear in a strategy document and still produce five different interpretations in five different teams. The words are easy to approve. The harder work begins when people have to decide what those words mean in a meeting, during onboarding, under deadline pressure or when two values point toward different choices.
The Genius Talk conversations behind this article approach culture from different directions, but they converge on a practical idea: culture becomes usable when people can see how it affects behavior and when the organization reinforces that behavior through its systems.
Aga Bajer focuses on translating broad values into specific, observable actions and involving employees in that translation. Matthew Person takes a more systems-oriented view through identity, instruction, intercommunication and feedback. Anthony Chaptal Taylor connects alignment to a clear organizational destination and repeated execution. Wesley Dove brings culture back to everyday leadership behavior, belonging and the connection between frontline work and mission. Danny Nathan adds the innovation test: can people question assumptions and experiment when the organization also values efficiency and repeatability?
Together, these perspectives turn culture from a branding exercise into an operating question.
What should people be able to observe here, and what in the system makes that behavior more likely to continue?
Start by diagnosing the culture that already exists
Culture work often begins with aspiration.
Leaders ask what values they want, which words should appear on a wall or what the company should become.
Bajer starts closer to lived experience. In her interview, she argues for involving employees or a representative group in identifying the behaviors and stories that helped the organization succeed in the past, support it now and may be needed in the future.
That changes the first question.
Instead of beginning only with, “What should our values be?” ask, “What actually happens here when we are at our best, and what repeatedly gets in the way?”
Those answers are more diagnostic.
A company may say it values ownership while employees describe waiting for approval on routine decisions. It may celebrate collaboration while its incentives reward isolated performance. It may describe itself as innovative while people know that a failed experiment attracts far more attention than a safe, mediocre result.
Person’s perspective reinforces the need to examine the current system. He rejects the idea that every organization should copy a standard “best workplace” culture. In his view, companies have different operating needs, and employees also bring different working preferences. Culture design therefore has to start with the organization in front of you.
Dove adds the leader’s behavior to the diagnosis. Recruitment, retention and culture may be discussed as HR topics, but his interview emphasizes the influence supervisors, managers and owners have through daily conduct.
A useful culture diagnosis therefore has at least three layers:
What people say matters.
What people actually do.
What the organization rewards, permits or makes difficult.
The gap between those layers is often where culture work needs to begin.
Give the culture a destination
Behavior becomes easier to align when people understand what the organization is trying to accomplish.
Anthony Chaptal Taylor treats vision as a destination. Mission or purpose, in his framework, clarifies who the organization serves and why. His five-step Alignment Program then moves from current state to destination, obstacles, actions and the ongoing work of staying on top of execution.
That last step is especially important for culture.
A company can spend days defining values and still underinvest in the long period when those values have to shape ordinary work. Taylor’s wider point about strategic planning applies directly: planning receives concentrated attention; execution happens across the rest of the year.
Culture needs the same continuity.
If the business says it values speed, people need to know what speed is for. If it values customer care, they need enough context to know when service should override efficiency and when it should not. If “challenge the status quo” is important, the organization still needs a destination so challenge does not become random disruption.
Values are more useful when they support a strategic direction.
This also prevents culture from becoming a collection of attractive but unrelated virtues. Most organizations could endorse trust, quality, innovation and teamwork. The sharper question is which behaviors help this organization serve its purpose and reach its destination.
Culture design becomes more practical when values help people make trade-offs.
Translate each value into behavior people can recognize
Bajer is particularly concrete on this point.
She distinguishes written values from culture that has been translated into specific behavior. In her example of a value such as “challenge the status quo,” the useful translation can begin with curiosity: asking what assumption sits behind the current way of working, or what another option might look like.
That is far more actionable than asking employees to “be innovative.”
A value should answer questions such as:
What would I see someone doing if this value were alive in the work?
What would I hear in a meeting?
What decision would be handled differently?
What behavior would violate the value even if the result looked good?
How should the value affect a new employee’s first month?
The answers should be specific enough that two people can discuss whether the behavior occurred.
Consider “ownership.” In one company, ownership might mean bringing a proposed solution when raising a problem. In another, it might mean making routine customer decisions without waiting for senior approval. In a regulated setting, ownership may require early escalation rather than independent action.
The word stays the same. The operating behavior changes with context.
This is why values borrowed from another company rarely solve the harder problem. The useful work is in defining what the value demands here.
Bajer’s employee-participation emphasis also matters. Leaders can set direction, but people closer to the work often know where the language will break down. Their examples can expose conflicts the executive team has not considered.
A value becomes stronger when employees can recognize themselves in the behavior and leaders are willing to be held to the same standard.
Values become useful when they help resolve a trade-off
The hardest culture moments rarely involve a choice between an obvious value and an obvious violation.
They involve two desirable things pulling in different directions.
Move quickly or involve more people?
Protect consistency or test a new approach?
Give the customer more flexibility or protect the delivery system?
Encourage autonomy or escalate a risk?
These are the situations in which vague values stop helping.
Taylor’s destination logic gives the organization a way to order the decision. The team can ask which choice better serves the mission, the strategic destination and the people the organization exists to serve.
Bajer’s behavior translation makes the trade-off discussable. If “ownership” has been defined only as “take initiative,” a person may push forward alone. If the behavior also specifies when affected colleagues must be consulted, ownership gains a boundary.
Person’s instruction layer matters for the same reason. Some cultural expectations should become operating rules because teams should not have to renegotiate them every time. Decision rights, escalation thresholds and performance standards can preserve the intent of a value when pressure rises.
A useful culture process therefore needs more than definitions. It needs examples of conflict.
For each important value, leaders can ask where it commonly collides with another priority and what principle should guide the trade-off. The answer does not need to predict every future case. It should give people enough reasoning to make a defensible choice and explain it afterward.
This is one reason culture cannot live entirely in slogans. Real work contains competing goods.
A culture becomes more mature when people can use its values to reason through those collisions rather than treating every value as if it always points in the same direction.
Participation improves culture design when leadership still makes choices
Employee involvement can become vague if “co-creation” is treated as a promise that every preference will be adopted.
Bajer’s approach is more useful when participation is treated as evidence gathering and sense-making.
Employees can identify stories, behaviors, friction points and contradictions. They can show leaders where stated values conflict with the way decisions are currently made. They can help define language that is credible in the actual workplace.
Leaders still have to choose.
They are responsible for the destination, the standards and the operating trade-offs the organization is willing to make.
Dove’s emphasis on belonging adds another reason to involve people. He argues that employees want to understand how they fit into the organization’s values and how their work contributes to mission and vision. That is his leadership interpretation from the interview, and it points toward a practical design principle: culture becomes easier to participate in when people can locate their own work inside it.
Participation therefore serves two purposes.
It improves the quality of the diagnosis, and it helps translate abstract culture into language people can connect with their daily decisions.
The process does not require a referendum on every value.
A workable pattern is for leaders to define the strategic destination, invite evidence and examples from the organization, translate the desired culture into behavior, test that behavior against real situations and then make the final operating expectations explicit.
This keeps participation meaningful without making the culture impossible to govern.
Culture needs an operating system
Matthew Person provides the clearest systems lens among the assigned experts.
His Square Management System has four sides: identity, instruction, intercommunication and information feedback.
The labels help explain why culture can fail even when the values are sensible.
Identity: who are we trying to be?
Identity includes the organization’s sense of itself, its priorities and the way it wants to operate.
This is where values, mission and strategic direction connect. Taylor’s destination work fits naturally here. People need enough shared context to understand what the organization is building toward and what kind of behavior is supposed to support that destination.
Identity without the other three sides remains aspirational.
Instruction: how does the work get done?
Person describes the consequences of weak onboarding, unclear procedures and missing performance definitions. Frontline managers fill the vacuum with their own version of the standard, and different teams begin to operate under different rules.
Culture is affected immediately.
If one manager rewards initiative and another punishes any deviation from the process, the organization does not have one lived rule about initiative.
Instruction turns values into repeatable expectations. It includes onboarding, role clarity, operating procedures, decision rights and performance standards.
This is where culture intersects with operations, but the purpose is distinct. Operations asks whether work can be delivered consistently. Culture asks what the organization teaches people about how to behave while doing that work.
Intercommunication: how does information move?
Person uses intercommunication to examine whether information flows in a way that builds clarity and trust.
This matters because culture is carried through conversations.
Who hears about a decision first? Can frontline information travel upward? Are teams learning from one another, or does every function operate inside its own version of reality? Do people know why a priority changed, or only that it changed?
Taylor’s emphasis on recurring two-way communication supports the same point. Alignment cannot be assumed after a planning session. It has to be maintained through repeated communication during execution.
Culture is therefore partly an information-flow problem.
A company that values transparency but leaves people to discover major changes through rumor has taught a stronger lesson than the value statement.
Information feedback: how does the organization learn?
Person’s fourth side is feedback, including how performance is measured, shared and used to evolve.
This closes the loop.
A value becomes credible when the organization notices behavior, discusses it and adjusts systems that keep producing the wrong result.
Feedback also needs to travel toward the company itself. Person explicitly includes organizational learning, not only employee performance reviews.
That creates a valuable discipline: if people repeatedly fail to behave in the desired way, ask whether the environment is working against the stated culture.
The issue may be an incentive, a bottleneck, a manager habit, a missing process or a communication failure.
Culture design becomes stronger when the system is allowed to be part of the diagnosis.
Communication turns values into repeated conversations
Culture is reinforced through ordinary language long after the value workshop ends.
A manager explains why a decision was made.
A team reviews a failed handoff.
A senior leader responds to bad news.
A new employee asks why the company works a certain way.
These are culture moments because they teach people what the organization means by its values.
Taylor’s alignment work emphasizes the need for recurring two-way communication rather than a single strategic event. Person focuses on the flow of information. Bajer makes values concrete through behavior and questions.
Combined, their perspectives suggest a useful standard: every important value should have conversations attached to it.
If curiosity is a value, teams need questions that help them examine assumptions.
If accountability matters, reviews should make ownership and follow-through visible.
If customer focus matters, customer evidence should appear in decisions rather than only in marketing language.
If collaboration matters, leaders should be able to point to the decisions, handoffs and information-sharing behavior that collaboration changes.
This also gives managers better language for feedback.
“You are not collaborative enough” is difficult to act on.
“In the last two project reviews, the other team received the decision after the work had already started; our expectation is that affected functions are brought in before the commitment is made” is observable.
Specificity turns culture feedback into something people can improve.
Innovation reveals whether the culture can tolerate useful uncertainty
Danny Nathan’s innovation work adds an important stress test.
He describes innovation as more than idea generation. His work connects strategy, product development, operational problems and the cultural conditions around experimentation.
One of his reported project examples began with a client considering separate applications for different rodeo audiences. Customer discovery suggested substantial overlap, and the concept changed into one combined experience. The useful lesson in the example is that discovery changed the original assumption.
Nathan argues that an innovation culture needs enough room for employees to question assumptions and propose unconventional ideas. He also identifies a real tension: established organizations often optimize for efficiency and repeatability, while discovery consumes time and can produce failed attempts.
That tension belongs inside culture design.
A company cannot simply declare that it values innovation and then evaluate every experiment as if the outcome should have been predictable from the start.
At the same time, “innovation” cannot become a license for endless activity without a strategic purpose.
Taylor’s destination becomes useful again. Experiments should serve a direction.
Person’s feedback system matters too. The organization needs a way to learn from the result.
Bajer’s behavioral translation makes the expectation concrete. People need to know what questioning an assumption looks like in a meeting or project review.
Culture supports innovation when it specifies where experimentation is welcome, what constraints still apply and how learning will be captured.
That is more demanding than putting “innovation” on the values page.
Reinforcement happens through what leaders notice and repeat
A value can be well defined and still fade if the organization never reinforces it.
Reinforcement does not require a constant recognition program. It requires consistency between what leaders say matters and what receives attention.
Dove’s work is relevant here because he locates culture in the behavior of supervisors, managers and owners. People read the choices leaders make under pressure.
What gets praised?
What gets promoted?
What gets ignored?
Which result earns approval even when the method violated a stated value?
Who gets protected from a standard because they are a strong performer?
What happens when a leader breaks the rule?
These moments establish the real hierarchy of values.
Person’s systems perspective adds the formal layer. Onboarding, performance definitions and feedback processes can either reinforce the culture or contradict it.
Bajer’s culture-ambassador example offers another mechanism: trusted employees can help model and activate the desired behaviors inside the organization. Her reported client outcomes should remain treated as guest-reported experience, but the mechanism itself is clear. Culture is easier to sustain when the behavior is visible across more than the executive team.
Reinforcement becomes stronger when it appears in both leadership behavior and organizational systems.
If only one changes, the old culture often has somewhere to hide.
Build a culture operating system
The assigned interviews can be synthesized into a practical culture operating system.
This is an editorial model built from their shared logic rather than a framework any one guest presented in this exact form.
1. Destination
Clarify where the organization is going, who it serves and what the work is trying to accomplish.
Taylor’s alignment perspective keeps culture connected to strategy.
2. Current-culture evidence
Collect stories and examples of what currently helps or harms the organization.
Use Bajer’s participation principle to involve people who experience the work from different positions.
3. Values translated into behavior
For each value, define observable actions, useful questions and unacceptable contradictions.
If a value cannot be recognized in a real situation, keep working on the translation.
4. Operating instruction
Put the culture into onboarding, role expectations, decision rights, procedures and performance definitions.
Person’s systems view is crucial here. People need to know how the desired culture changes work.
5. Communication flow
Decide how information travels across levels and functions.
Create recurring two-way conversations so alignment can be repaired while execution is still happening.
6. Feedback and learning
Measure, discuss and improve both individual behavior and the organizational system around it.
When the same cultural problem repeats, investigate the environment as well as the person.
7. Reinforcement
Make leadership reactions, recognition, promotion, consequences and everyday management consistent with the stated culture.
Dove’s focus on leader behavior belongs here.
8. Permission to question assumptions
Define where challenge and experimentation are useful, how risk will be bounded and how learning will be captured.
Nathan’s innovation perspective prevents culture from becoming only a tool for consistency.
The operating system should be reviewed as the organization changes.
A culture that supported a small founder-led team may need clearer instruction and information flow as more people join. A culture built for stable execution may need more deliberate room for experimentation when the strategy changes.
Intentional culture can evolve. Changes are made with awareness of the behavior and systems they are likely to produce.
A culture audit leaders can run on real work
The easiest way to test culture is to use current situations rather than abstract opinions.
Take a recent decision, project failure, customer issue, onboarding experience or cross-functional conflict and ask:
Destination: Did people understand the priority the organization was trying to protect?
Values: Which value was relevant, and was its expected behavior clear?
Instruction: Did people know their role, decision rights and standard?
Communication: Did the right information reach the right people in time?
Feedback: Did the organization learn from what happened?
Leadership behavior: Did managers reinforce the stated expectation through their response?
Innovation: Were people able to question an assumption where that would have been useful?
This kind of audit turns culture into evidence.
It also reduces the temptation to diagnose every culture problem as an attitude problem.
Sometimes the values are unclear. Sometimes the process contradicts them. Sometimes managers are rewarding the opposite behavior. Sometimes people do not understand the strategic destination. Sometimes the system gives them no safe or efficient way to act as the culture supposedly expects.
The audit helps locate the failure before the organization launches another values campaign.
Culture becomes real when the system can carry it
Bajer gives culture behavioral specificity. Person shows how identity, instruction, communication and feedback turn it into a system. Taylor connects it to direction and execution. Dove locates culture in the repeated behavior of leaders and in employees’ connection to purpose. Nathan tests whether the environment has room to question assumptions when innovation requires it.
The tension between these perspectives is useful.
Culture needs participation because leaders cannot see every lived contradiction from the top. It also needs systems because shared enthusiasm does not create consistent operating rules by itself.
It needs stability so people know what the organization stands for. It also needs feedback so the culture can change when the organization’s context changes.
That gives leaders a more practical definition of culture design.
Define the destination. Learn how work is actually happening. Translate values into behavior. Build those behaviors into instruction, communication and feedback. Reinforce them through leadership. Keep enough room for challenge and learning.
When those pieces line up, values stop being decorative.
They begin to shape how the organization works.
The test is simple enough to observe: when pressure arrives, can people explain what the culture asks them to do, and do the surrounding systems make that behavior possible? If the answer keeps changing by manager, meeting or moment, the design work is still unfinished.
That observation also gives culture work a practical review cycle. Leaders can compare the stated behavior with recent decisions, onboarding, handoffs and feedback conversations, then repair the part of the system that is teaching a different rule. Culture becomes easier to improve when the evidence comes from real work rather than another round of abstract adjectives.