Building Company Culture You Can See
- Jerry Olson
- Sep 19
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 22
Author, Jerry Olson, is a Business Advisor with The Resultants.
A lot of leaders think culture is a poster on the wall or a paragraph on the website.
It’s not.
Culture is the behavior people see on Tuesday at 10:15am.
If you want a work environment where people want to come to work, you have to make culture visible, repeatable, and enforced.
Not with slogans, but with clear expectations, daily habits, and consistent follow-through.
It’s not complicated. But it is work.
Here are 6 steps to building a culture you can see.
Step 1: Define Behaviors Based on Values
A great culture starts with your core values.
Values like Integrity, Ownership, Customer Focus are a good start.
But they’re not enough.
People can’t act on a word. They can act on a behavior.
Pick 3–5 core values. For each value, write 3–5 observable behaviors that bring it to life.
Put it on one page. If it takes a paragraph to explain, it won’t survive Tuesday.
That one page becomes your culture operating system. It’s how people know “what good looks like” here.
Step 2: Make Culture Practice a Daily Habit
Once you have the behaviors defined, you need to make time for practice.
Leaders often want to skip this because “we’re busy.”
But it’s worth the time and effort.
I think back to a small business owner I met recently who told me she’s never worried about employees abusing new leave laws. Why? Because her people love coming to work. They’re clear about what they’re trying to accomplish and they have fun doing it together.
That’s culture at work.
Here are some ideas for adding cultural behavior practice into your normal routines:
Start meetings with a value. 60–90 seconds: name the value, read the behaviors, share one example from last week.
Offer micro-praise in the moment. “Sue, thanks for staying with that customer until it was resolved. That’s Customer Focus in action. Keep up the good work!” It only takes a minute.
Quarterly culture awards. Recognize specific behaviors in front of the whole company.
When you talk about the behaviors—and catch people doing them—culture becomes visible. People know what matters.
Step 3: Hire and Promote for Behavior Fit
Too many employers rush to fill a seat, using a hiring process that overweighs resumes and underweights behavior.
That’s a costly mistake.
Skills can be taught. Behaviors can’t.
Build behavior screening into recruiting and selection: “Tell me about a time you inherited a messy customer issue. What did you do that day?”
Define red-flag behaviors. Then when you hear blame, credit-hogging, or contempt for peers – don’t hire.
When you start with behavior fit, everything downstream gets easier.
Step 4: Manage Performance and Behavior
Here’s where many leaders get stuck.
They tolerate bad behavior because someone “hits the number.”
That’s the fastest way to poison a team.
The fix: evaluate both performance and behavior, every time.
Outcomes: Did they deliver results?
Behaviors: Did they live the values we defined?
Neither compensates for the other. High performance with bad behavior is still a fail. So is great behavior with no results.
Step 5: Hold the Line (Especially with “Rainmakers”)
The real test of culture is whether you’ll part ways with a high performer who undermines it.
This often shows up as the “rainmaker problem”: the salesperson who brings in big deals but leaves a wake behind them.
It’s a tough call, but when leaders finally make the decision, the team breathes a sigh of relief. Sometimes even the customers do.
And yes, you may need to rebuild a relationship or two. But long term, you win. Because the people who stay are all pulling in the same direction.
That’s when culture becomes real. When it’s strong enough to say no, even to revenue.
Step 6: Celebrate What You Want to See
What you celebrate, you multiply.
Formal: Quarterly culture awards tied to specific behaviors.
Informal: Daily micro-praise.
Stories: Capture short examples of values lived out and share them in all-hands.
It only takes a minute. And it reinforces exactly how you want people to show up.
What Changes When Culture Is Visible
When you work this system for 6–12 months, a few things happen:
Decisions stick. Less second-guessing after the meeting.
Handoffs smooth out. Sales trusts Ops. Ops trusts Finance.
Issues lists shrink. Not because problems vanish, but because the team resolves them faster with less drama.
Engagement goes up. People feel their work matters and enjoy who they work with.
Leaders get time back. Less firefighting. More strategy. Real “leader freedom.”
I’ve seen leadership teams hit the 12-month mark and realize they don’t have much of an issues list anymore.
Instead of firefighting last week’s problems, they’re asking, “What do we want to build next quarter?”
That’s what culture clarity makes possible.
Most companies don’t fail because of bad strategy. They fail because they tolerate bad habits.
Make your culture something people can see: the behaviors you hire for, talk about, reward, and enforce.
Do that consistently, and you’ll build the most durable competitive advantage there is: great people who are fully engaged in a mission that matters.
That’s the kind of workplace people wake up wanting to join.
If that’s the company you want to lead, let’s connect.
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