Slogans versus comportamentos

"A consistent pattern emerged: many leaders treat culture as a communication strategy. They believe it lives in messaging—in the articulation of purpose, the rollout of values, the tone of internal campaigns. But culture doesn't shift because a new narrative is introduced. It shifts when systems change. When leaders take personal risks. When norms are not just declared but demonstrated.

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What we found was striking: culture doesn't fail because it's forgotten. It fails because it's misunderstood. It's treated as branding, not behavior. As output, not infrastructure. And when that happens— even the most well-meaning efforts can erode the very trust they're meant to build. 

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In companies where senior leaders changed how they led—how they ran meetings, gave feedback, made decisions, and responded to challenge—trust scores rose by an average of 26%, even in the absence of a branded campaign. Asone executive told us, “We didn’t write our values—we reverse-engineered them fromhow we wanted to behave.” Another senior leader put it simply: “We didn’t announce aculture shift. We just started acting like it mattered.”

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The strongest cultural signals are those that involve visible, personal risk. That might mean changing how incentives work. It might mean enforcing values even when it means losing a top performer. It might mean sharing decision-making power that used to sit solely at the top. Without that cost, values remain performative — they read as theatre, not truth.

Employees aren't waiting for leaders to be perfect. They're waiting for them to be consistent-especially when it's inconvenient. Choose one declared value. Then ask: where would living this value cost us — power, money, speed, control? Then, take one visible action in that direction and be consistent."

Estes trechos captam na perfeição algo que tantas vezes é esquecido: a cultura não vive em slogans, mas em comportamentos consistentes. Gostei em particular da ideia de "reverse-engineering" dos valores a partir da forma como queremos agir. É um lembrete poderoso de que a cultura se constrói no risco visível, na coerência diária e nas escolhas difíceis — não em campanhas internas.

Trechos retirados de "To Change Company Culture, Focus on Systems-Not Communication"