Every organisation has a culture, whether it has been intentionally designed or not. The real question for leaders is whether that culture supports the level of performance, accountability, and experience they are trying to create.
Culture is not built through values posters or leadership slogans alone. It is shaped through everyday behaviours, decisions, systems, and standards. What gets rewarded, tolerated, prioritised, and ignored all contribute to culture.
What Is a High-Performance Culture?
Most leaders already understand that culture matters. The challenge is knowing how to build a high-performance culture without creating burnout, disengagement, or unnecessary complexity.
What Culture Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Culture is defined in practice, not theory. It’s what happens when a deadline is missed and no one speaks up. It’s how a new starter learns what really matters around here. It’s what your team does when you’re not in the room.
Two things are worth keeping in mind:
- Culture varies by team, function, and level. In many organisations, there is no single “organisational culture.” There can be many micro-cultures operating at once, which is why two people can work at the same company and describe completely different experiences.
- Culture is not static. Like the external environment it exists in, is ever-changing. It shifts constantly: with pressure, with growth, with leadership changes, with what gets reinforced. So, longevity is not the goal. Plenty of organisations have persistent, lasting cultures that are genuinely bad. The goal is a culture worth sustaining, one that is good for the people in it and productive in its outcomes.
How to Evaluate Your Organisation’s Culture
A sustainable high-performance culture is built across three layers:
- Foundation: the why
- Systems: the what
- Connection: the how
Foundation: Establishing a Strong “Why”
This is the layer leaders most often underestimate. People are more likely to stay engaged when leadership behaviour aligns with organisational messaging. Employees quickly notice gaps between what leaders say is important and what is actually reinforced in practice.
Strong foundations include:
- Visible leadership behaviour (you can’t mandate what you don’t model)
- Authentic vision and mission that people can emotionally connect to, not just values on a wall
- Trust and psychological safety built through consistency, honesty, and follow-through
- Clarity around why their work matters
One of the most common mistakes organisations make is assuming people automatically connect their role to the broader purpose. They usually don’t. That connection has to be actively reinforced.
Questions to ask here:
- Can people clearly explain what matters most right now?
- Do leadership behaviours match the standards being communicated?
- Do people understand why their work matters?
- Where is trust being strengthened or quietly eroded?
- If you asked the team what leadership truly values, what would they say?
Systems: Identifying What is Important
Strong systems usually include:
- Clear expectations on both role requirements and success metrics
- Regular and consistent lightweight check-ins, not just annual reviews
- Feedback loops that help teams adjust quickly
- Recognition that reinforces behaviours, not just outcomes
- Onboarding that teaches people how things really work here
One practical mistake leaders make here is confusing unclear expectations with poor performance. A surprising amount of underperformance is actually confusion! People can’t consistently deliver to a standard they don’t fully understand.
A simple expectations framework I use is:
- What needs to happen?
- Why does it matter?
- When does it need to happen?
Then give people ownership over the how. That’s where accountability and autonomy start to work together.
Questions to ask here:
- Are our expectations actually clear or just assumed?
- What behaviours get rewarded here, intentionally or unintentionally?
- Where are we tolerating behaviour that contradicts our values?
- Does onboarding teach culture in theory, or through lived experience?
- Do our systems create clarity or create friction?
Connection: Strengthening How People Work Together
This is the layer that often determines whether performance is sustainable or fragile. High-performance cultures are built on strong working relationships. Not just functional collaboration but genuine trust, clarity and shared accountability.
When teams work well together, collaboration is faster, feedback happens earlier, people are more willing to ask for help, accountability becomes more natural, and energy goes toward solving problems rather than navigating friction.
This doesn’t happen by accident. Strong cultures intentionally create space for connection, learning, and growth. Building mentoring into your culture is an incredibly effective way to do that at scale. Coaching, cross-functional collaboration, shared team norms, regular reflection, and other opportunities for peer learning are also valuable
Mentoring in particular plays a powerful role because it creates connection outside formal reporting lines. It gives people space to think differently, build confidence, learn from others, and navigate challenges with greater perspective. Research on mentoring across the employee lifecycle shows this value isn’t confined to new starters. It holds at every career stage.
Importantly, connection does not mean avoiding accountability. The strongest working relationships are usually the ones where people can communicate clearly, challenge respectfully, and work through issues early rather than letting frustration build quietly.
Questions to ask here:
- Do people know how to work well together, or are we assuming they do?
- Are teams collaborating effectively across functions?
- Do people feel supported to learn and grow?
- What behaviours strengthen trust here, and what quietly erode it?
What Leaders Get Wrong About Culture Building
The Problem with Over-Engineering Culture
One of the most common mistakes is treating culture assessment as the primary, or only, way of listening to people. Surveys and diagnostics have real value. They surface patterns, identify hotspots, and provide useful benchmarks. But culture cannot only be measured retrospectively through formal reporting cycles.
Many of the most important signals are already visible long before a survey tells you something is wrong. You can hear culture in:
- The conversations leaders avoid
- How teams respond under pressure
- Whether feedback happens early or late
- Who gets rewarded
- Where decision-making slows down
- How new starters describe the environment
- Whether people speak up in meetings
- How accountability is handled
- How much energy people are bringing to the work
The risk is not measurement. The risk is leaders becoming disconnected from the everyday signals around them because they are waiting for a formal report to validate what they can already see, hear, and feel.
Good culture work combines structured data and active leadership observation because culture is lived in real time, not just measured quarterly.
And importantly, most of those signals don’t appear first at the organisational level. They show up in teams, meetings, leadership behaviours, communication patterns, and how accountability and collaboration actually work day-to-day.
Which brings us to the next point.
Culture is Not Built at Org-Level Alone
In most cases, culture is built (and broken) at the team level, every day. Through team meetings, decision making, feedback, prioritisation, recognition and what gets tolerated.
Waiting for an organisational-wide initiative to land before changing anything is often just another form of avoidance. Leaders have far more influence over culture than they think, especially in the micro-moments.
There Is No Universal “Culture Playbook”
What worked at a 2,000-person financial services firm won’t translate to a 50-person scale-up. Context matters. Industry matters. Leadership capability matters. Growth stage matters.
The goal isn’t to copy another high-performing organisation’s culture. It’s to intentionally design one that supports your strategy, your people, and the experience you want employees to have.
Comfort Does Not Equal Good Culture
A comfortable culture is not automatically a healthy one.
Some teams are incredibly “nice” while simultaneously avoiding accountability, difficult feedback, and ownership. That eventually impacts performance.
Ping-pong tables and free lunches don’t fix poor leadership. And high performance achieved through fear eventually creates burnout, disengagement, and attrition.
Sustainable high-performance cultures sit in the tension between clarity, care, and accountability. Not one at the expense of the others.
Culture Is a Performance Strategy
Culture is not separate from business performance. It shapes how effectively a business executes strategy. It influences how quickly organisations adapt, how leaders respond under pressure, how decisions get made, and whether teams can sustain performance over time.
That’s why culture should not be treated as a “soft” leadership topic or standalone People & Culture initiative. It is part of the operating environment that either enables performance or quietly undermines it.
Sustainable high performance requires balance. Performance without wellbeing eventually breaks people. Wellbeing without accountability eventually breaks performance. The strongest cultures hold both.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace research, business units in the top quartile for employee engagement outperform those in the bottom quartile across every key performance measure. That includes profitability (23% higher, in fact!), productivity, and customer satisfaction. Disengaged employees, by contrast, cost the global economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity each year.
Building a high performance culture is not about launching a values campaign or running one-off initiatives. It requires a deliberate approach to understanding the current experience, defining what great looks like, embedding it into everyday moments and continuously learning what’s working.
I said this at the beginning: every system is designed for the result it gets. Culture is no different. If the current culture is creating friction, confusion, burnout, silos or inconsistent performance, that is not happening by accident. It is being shaped by the systems, behaviours and leadership habits around it.
So don’t leave culture to chance. Design for it. Not through a massive transformation program but through deliberate choices about how people lead, communicate, collaborate and work together every day.
That’s where my four-stage approach comes in.
How to Build a High- Performance Culture: A Four Stage Approach
One of the biggest misconceptions about culture work is that it needs to be large, slow or organisation-wide to matter. In reality, some of the most effective culture shifts start at a team level.
Culture is always evolving, which means culture work is never really “done.” The goal is simple: pay attention to the experience people are having, identify what is helping or hurting performance, and intentionally design for better.
Here’s a quick scan of the four stages. You can swipe through them below, then we’ll walk through each one.
- What's helping us perform well right now?
- What's getting in the way?
- What feels harder than it should?
- Where do we create friction for ourselves?
- What should we do more, less, or differently?
- What behaviour do we need more of?
- What are we unintentionally reinforcing today?
- What would "better" look like in practice?
- What is one change that would make the biggest difference right now?
- What's improving?
- What still feels clunky?
- What should we adjust?
- What's feeling better?
- What still feels frustrating?
- What changes have made the biggest difference?
- Where are we slipping back into old habits?
- What should we keep, stop, or improve from here?
Step One: Discover - What is the Current Experience?
Before changing anything, get clear on what’s actually happening. What’s helping performance? What’s creating friction? Where are people getting stuck?
Most leaders already have more signals than they realise. Look at recurring frustrations, meeting dynamics, where decisions slow down, what people avoid talking about, what gets tolerated under pressure, where teams heavily rely on too few people, and where energy feels flat.
Importantly, don’t rely only on your own perspective as the leader. Talk to your team. This does not need to be formal. A team discussion or a series of honest 1:1 conversations can surface far more than a survey alone.
Questions to ask:
- What’s helping us perform well right now?
- What’s getting in the way?
- What feels harder than it should?
- Where do we create friction for ourselves?
- What should we do more, less, or differently?
The goal is not to uncover every issue. It’s to identify the patterns that matter most.
Step Two: Design - What Needs to Change?
Once you understand the friction points, decide what needs to change. Co-design a response. Not a program, a targeted response. Keep it practical!
This might mean clarifying ownership, resetting meeting rhythms, improving onboarding, changing communication habits, introducing clearer accountability, improving cross-team collaboration, or recognising different behaviours.
Questions to ask:
- What behaviour do we need more of?
- What are we unintentionally reinforcing today?
- What would “better” look like in practice?
- What is one change that would make the biggest difference right now?
Step Three: Experiment - Run It Before It's Perfect
Culture shifts through repeated behaviours, not announcements.
Pilot the new rhythm, reset the expectation, change the way decisions are made, try running conversations differently. Then pay attention to what happens.
Questions to ask here:
- What’s improving?
- What still feels clunky?
- What should we adjust?
Step Four: Measure - What’s Changed, What Didn’t, and Is That Good?
Look at both the operational and human impact of the change.
- Are meetings more effective?
- Are issues being raised earlier?
- Is accountability improving?
- Is collaboration easier?
- Does the team feel clearer and more energised?
This is not about “scoring” culture. It’s about learning what is helping performance and what still needs attention.
Go back to the team and ask:
- What’s feeling better?
- What still feels frustrating?
- What changes have made the biggest difference?
- Where are we slipping back into old habits?
- What should we keep, stop or improve from here?
Then Loop Right Back
This is crucial: repeat this process.
Culture isn’t static. Organisations are evolving constantly, through growth, restructures, leadership changes, market pressure and changing employee expectations. Your culture needs to evolve with your team, the business and the environment around it.
What Does This Look Like In Practice?
The first assumption was a capability issue. It wasn't.
- Leaders stepping into rescue mode too often
- Expectations varied between teams
- Unclear decision ownership
- Feedback happening too late
- High activity, inconsistent priorities
- Clarified ownership and decision-making
- Reset team meeting rhythms
- Improved how priorities were communicated
- Set clearer accountability standards for leaders
- New meeting structures trialled
- Leaders practised clearer expectation-setting
- Teams encouraged to escalate risks earlier
- Faster decision-making
- Less duplication of work
- Better cross-functional collaboration
- Issues surfaced earlier
- Accountability conversations normalised
- Leaders spending less time rescuing avoidable problems
What Does a Sustainable High-Performance Culture Actually Look Like?
As an Inspiring Workplaces judge, I get the chance to review organisations from across industries, sizes, and growth stages. Despite all their differences, the strongest cultures tend to share a few things in common. They are clear, human, and intentional. Not perfect.
The organisations that stand out are rarely the ones with the most polished submissions. They are the ones where the experience clearly matches the words.
Here are some of the strongest indicators:
Leadership behaviour is consistent
Performance and care coexist
High-performing cultures are not built through fear, but they are not built through avoidance either. People need clarity, accountability, and support. They need to know what’s expected, where they stand and that accountability matters. But they also need to feel respected, supported and able to grow.
The best cultures hold high standards without creating unnecessary fear or ego around performance conversations.
Teams understand the “why”
Culture shows up operationally
Candour exists alongside trust
The organisation keeps learning
A Call to Honest Reflection
Most leaders can tell you what they want their culture to be. Fewer are willing to look closely at the culture they are actually creating.
Because culture is not built in leadership off-sites or values presentations alone. It’s built in what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, how pressure is handled, and what leaders choose to tolerate over time.
It’s built in the meeting after the meeting, the feedback conversation that never happens, the high performer who gets away with behaviour that damages the team, and the leader who says people matter but consistently rewards burnout and heroics.
That’s the uncomfortable part of culture work.
Sometimes the systems, behaviours, and leadership habits inside a business are perfectly designed for the outcomes everyone says they don’t want.
So before launching another initiative, it’s worth asking:
- What are people learning from how leadership behaves under pressure?
- Where are we unintentionally rewarding the wrong things?
- What behaviours are we tolerating because someone delivers results?
- Where does the employee experience not match leadership intention?
- If someone new joined the team tomorrow, what would they say really matters here?
- And if we’re honest, is our current culture helping performance or quietly getting in the way of it?
Culture work is rarely about doing more. More often, it’s about paying closer attention to the experience people are already having, and being willing to change what no longer serves the team, the business, or the people inside it.
Whether intentional or not, leaders are shaping culture every day.
