A Winning Culture
You cannot be a winning organization if you do not win
I have been teaching a lot lately about what a winning culture means and what it takes to build one. Not culture in the soft sense. Not culture as slogans on a wall. Not culture as a leadership offsite where people agree on values, write them down, and then return to work unchanged.
A winning culture is something much more demanding. It is a system of shared expectations about what matters, how high the bar is, how people are evaluated, what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, and what happens when performance falls short.
The uncomfortable truth is that you cannot build a winning culture by talking about winning. You build it by doing things that prove you mean it.
People have heard the speeches before. They have heard leaders say the company needs to be more ambitious, more accountable, more focused, more disciplined, more performance oriented. They have heard that excellence will be rewarded and underperformance will be addressed. Then they watch what actually happens.
They watch who gets promoted. They watch who gets protected. They watch which priorities survive. They watch which meetings dominate the calendar. They watch which projects get funded. They watch whether underperformers stay in place and whether overperformers are truly recognized.
Culture is not what leaders say. Culture is what people conclude from repeated evidence.
The credibility problem
Every effort to build a winning culture begins with a credibility problem. Employees have lived through previous campaigns. New strategy. New values. New operating model. New transformation program. New language. New posters. Many of these efforts created energy for a few weeks or months, but eventually faded into the background.
So when leaders say, “This time is different,” people do not immediately believe them. They wait. They look for proof. They ask, often silently, whether leadership is really willing to make different choices this time.
The proof usually comes from hard things. Stopping a popular project that no longer matters. Moving a leader who delivers excuses instead of results. Changing an incentive system that rewards activity rather than outcomes. Setting targets that make people uncomfortable. Simplifying priorities even when every function wants its initiative protected. Naming performance differences clearly.
These are the moments when people decide whether the organization is serious. A winning culture requires credible commitment, and credible commitment usually has a cost. If nothing difficult changes, people assume nothing real has changed.
Do hard things first
If leaders want people to believe the standard has changed, they need to do something visible that would not have happened under the old standard. That is the signal. Not the speech, but the decision.
A company might shut down projects that consume attention but do not advance the strategy. It might remove complexity from the operating model. It might stop rewarding leaders who hit local targets while damaging the enterprise. It might put a real performance process in place. It might make clear that seniority, politics, and proximity to power are not substitutes for contribution.
The specific action will differ across organizations, but the logic is always the same. People ask, “Are they really willing to pay a price for this?” When the answer is no, the culture does not change. When the answer is yes, people start to update their beliefs.
That is why symbolic decisions matter. They are not symbolic because they are superficial. They are symbolic because they reveal what the organization truly values. A hard decision tells people that the new standard is not just language. It has consequences.
Stretch targets create ambition
Winning cultures need ambition, and ambition requires more than encouragement. Leaders need to commit publicly to stretch targets that move the organization out of its comfort zone.
A stretch target tells people that the current trajectory is not enough. It creates urgency and forces new thinking. It also creates a public commitment. Once leaders commit to a higher bar, they cannot quietly retreat when the work gets difficult without damaging their credibility.
In our research with my coauthors Shelley Xin Li from USC and Ioannis Ioannou from LBS, we found organizations setting more ambitious targets were completing a higher percentage of the target.
But stretch targets require discipline. A good stretch target is hard. It forces creativity. It is connected to the drivers people can actually influence. It is also few enough that the organization can remember it and organize around it.
Too many targets destroy focus. A winning culture does not ask people to do everything. It asks them to do the few things that matter most, at a much higher standard.
Differentiation is not optional
A winning organization cannot pretend that all performance is the same. This is where many cultures break down. Leaders say performance matters, but evaluation systems blur differences. Everyone gets a similar rating, a similar message, and a similar outcome.
That may feel kind in the short term, but it is corrosive over time. The strongest performers notice. The weakest performers learn that the bar is negotiable. Managers avoid hard conversations. The organization loses its ability to tell the truth about itself.
A winning culture requires a performance evaluation system that forces differentiation. Not because leaders should be harsh or mechanical, but because contribution is not evenly distributed and the system has to recognize that reality.
People should understand what great performance looks like, where they stand, what they need to improve, and what happens when performance is exceptional or consistently weak.
Without differentiation, accountability becomes rhetoric.
Incentives reveal what the organization values
People listen to what leaders say, but they learn from what the organization rewards. The reward system is one of the clearest expressions of culture.
If incentives reward politics, people learn politics. If incentives reward activity, people create activity. If incentives reward risk avoidance, people avoid risk. If incentives reward clear results delivered in the right way, people learn that performance matters.
Incentives do not need to be only financial. Recognition matters. Promotion matters. Autonomy matters. Access to important work matters. Being trusted with larger responsibilities matters. But the principle is simple: a winning culture must make performance clearly worthwhile.
People should not have to guess whether excellence matters. They should see it in decisions about compensation, promotion, recognition, resource allocation, and opportunity. When rewards and words diverge, rewards win.
Simplification is a cultural act
Winning cultures are focused cultures. They reduce noise, make tradeoffs, and clarify what matters and what does not.
This sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest things for organizations to do. Most companies accumulate complexity over time. More initiatives. More committees. More metrics. More approvals. More strategic themes. More transformation programs. Eventually, everything is important, which means nothing is.
Simplification is not administrative cleanup. It is a cultural act. It tells people, “This is where we win.” It gives people permission to stop doing things that no longer matter. It creates the conditions for speed, learning, and accountability.
The more ambitious the organization becomes, the more ruthless it must be about focus. A winning culture needs a small number of priorities, a small number of metrics, and a clear connection between daily work and enterprise goals.
People need to know what to say yes to. Just as important, they need to know what to say no to (a topic I covered in a previous post).
Communication has to be relentless
Culture does not change because something was said once. It changes because the same message is communicated again and again until it becomes the operating logic of the organization.
Leaders often get bored with the message before the organization has absorbed it. That is a mistake. If the goal is cultural change, repetition is critical.
The message should be simple and consistent. Here is what winning means. Here is the standard. Here is what matters most. Here is how we will measure progress. Here is what we will reward. Here is what we will no longer tolerate.
Then leaders need to keep communicating it in every setting that matters. In town halls. In performance reviews. In resource allocation meetings. In promotion decisions. In strategy discussions. In informal conversations.
The words matter, but only when paired with decisions. Communication explains the standard. Action proves the standard.
You cannot be a winning organization if you do not win
There is one more point that leaders sometimes avoid. At some point, the culture has to produce results. Effort is not enough. Intent is not enough. Process is not enough.
You cannot be a winning organization if you do not win.
This does not mean leaders should chase superficial wins or manipulate short term outcomes. It means that a winning culture must eventually show up in performance. Better customer outcomes. Faster execution. Higher quality decisions. Improved margins.
I am a big believer that early wins matter because they create belief. They show people that the new standard works. They give the organization confidence. They convert skeptics. They make the next hard thing easier.
Winning is both the outcome of culture and the fuel for culture. The organization starts to believe because it starts to see results.
Put it to work
For leaders trying to build a winning culture, the first question is: what hard thing will prove we are serious? If nothing painful changes, people will assume nothing real has changed.
The second question is: what stretch target will move us out of our comfort zone? The target should be ambitious enough to force different behavior, but clear enough to guide action.
The third question is: can we clearly distinguish great performance from weak performance? If the answer is no, the culture will not support excellence.
The fourth question is: do our incentives match our words? People should see that performance, contribution, and the right behaviors are rewarded.
The fifth question is: have we simplified enough for people to focus? Winning requires clarity, and complexity often protects the status quo.
The leadership question
Every organization says it wants to win. The real question is whether it is willing to build the system that winning requires.
That system is demanding. It requires hard choices, public ambition, honest evaluation, aligned incentives, simplification, relentless communication, and visible results. It requires leaders to do things that make the commitment credible.