When it comes to “culture,” most corporate leaders talk a better game than they play. The household moving industry, familiar to most readers, provides two contrasting examples from the authors’ recent experience:

Example 1: In arranging for his furniture shipment from San Francisco to New York, Zia spoke with several moving companies. He chose one that was recommended by a friend, and whose corporate claims of a "fast, reliable, and caring" culture were convincing. The actual experience was decidedly the opposite. The movers were openly lazy, slow, rude, and repeatedly ignored Zia’s fervent plea to "please be more careful." To make matters worse, they left when he wasn't looking without completing the unpacking. Somehow the corporate claims of a reliable, caring culture never connected to worker attitudes and behaviors on the job.

Example 2: The Gentle Giant moving company in New England may be the exception that proves the rule. Jon and his wife recently chose Gentle Giant to take their furniture from South Carolina to Virginia. Not only was the end result faster and better than expected, but the experience itself was remarkably positive. The movers often ran to and from the truck (for exercise as well as speed), and helped Linda with "non-moving" tasks (like dishes, laundry, and garbage). In addition, when they saw that the move might take longer than anticipated, they flew two senior managers from Boston to Charleston, South Carolina, to make sure they did not miss the target date. Clearly, the Gentle Giant has a "corporate culture" that works with its leaders to exceed the customers’ expectations.

Both companies state that customer satisfaction is a central part of their strategy, and both use essentially the same operating equipment and procedures. So what explains the difference? Simply put, one has a culture that works for the company and one does not. We find this to be true of many seemingly similar companies that have different performance results.

What is the Performance Secret?

In our experience, peak-performing companies whose leaders manage to get their culture working for them actually have three "secrets" that their competitors overlook:

They view culture as a mandatory enabler of strategic performance: This is in marked contrast to most companies, which view “culture” as a catchall for top-down communication efforts to build employee engagement. In contrast, Southwest Airlines’ strategic performance demands low-cost behavior—their formal structures and processes are designed to that end. More importantly, however, the entire workforce, from corporate staff through pilots, airport agents, stewards, and baggage handlers are emotionally committed to low-cost behaviors. Their culture works with their structures and programs to accelerate the behaviors that matter to their target customers. As most business travelers can attest, this is a rarity in the industry.

They seldom focus on culture directly: Instead, they concentrate on influencing a few critical behaviors that matter most for performance and let the "culture change" follow. The "father" of corporate culture thinking is probably Edgar Schein, Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at MIT. While his work tells us that "culture is hugely important," it also cautions us to be wary of working on it directly. Our own work argues that it is far better to aim at something more concrete and tangible like a performance result or a specific set of behaviors that can deliver performance results in a different way. For example, General Motors is already well along in reshaping its culture after bankruptcy literally destroyed it—but that has come more from a relentless focus on changing behaviors than on any broader attempts to "change the culture."

They use both formal (rational) and informal (emotional) “mechanisms” to ensure the critical behaviors: When it comes to motivating behavior change, the emotional side of your workforce is at least as important as the rational side. Too often, however, leaders concentrate their attention on the rational and formal elements and leave the emotional to instinct and chance. For example, under the leadership of Jack Rowe and Ron Williams, Aetna accomplished a remarkable turnaround (from losing $1 million per day in 2002 to earning $5 million daily in 2006). In the preceding several years, three different leadership teams had attempted a similar major change, but their programmatic efforts were delayed and derailed by the emotional side of the "Aetna nice" culture. In marked contrast, Rowe and Williams mobilized the informal and emotional elements of their effort with a series of cross-organizational interactions.

One Without the Other Seldom Works

Changing a culture can be a daunting challenge. It almost never happens easily, nor by following a path of "engaging our employees." In our experience, the more successful "culture change efforts" focus their attention first on changing the critical few behaviors that matter most for performance. Moreover, they have done it by ensuring cross-organization interactions to reinforce and accelerate the formal hierarchical and programmatic efforts. In a nutshell, you need to be sure that the informal aspects of your culture are "jumping together" with the more formal dimensions of your leadership approach.

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Jon Katzenbach is a senior partner at Booz & Company and leads the Katzenbach Center, where approaches in leadership, culture, and organization performance are developed for client application. His consulting career has been largely focused in these areas and spans several decades across several different professional books, including Wisdom of Teams, Peak Performance, Why Pride Matters More Than Money, and the new Leading Outside the Lines. He received his MBA from Harvard, where he was a Baker Scholar. Jon is a founding partner of Katzenbach Partners.

Zia Khan, co-author of Leading Outside the Lines, is vice president for strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation, which supports innovations that help people share globalization’s benefits more equitably and strengthens their resilience to social, economic, health, and environmental challenges. Zia also advises leaders on the integration of strategy and organization as a senior fellow of the Katzenbach Center, which he co-founded with Jon Katzenbach, and as an individual consultant. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Zia established and led Katzenbach Partners’ San Francisco office and West Coast practice and pioneered the firm’s work on the informal organization. Zia hold a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Jon Katzenbach is senior partner at Booz & Company. Zia Khan is vice president of strategy and evaluation at The Rockefeller Foundation.