Culture Is a Symptom, Not a Cause
Processes produce your results. If you want to improve results, you have to improve the processes that produce them. It’s a simple enough principle…to understand. Until you apply it to culture, and leaders suddenly reach for something else entirely: rather than processes they focus on a values campaign, an engagement survey, a town hall about who we want to be.
Culture isn’t a lever you pull directly. It’s a symptom. Your processes are the cause — how you set direction, how you execute plans, what you measure and why, who gets invited into improvement work, and what actually gets recognized when improvement happens (or not). Change those, and culture changes as a byproduct.
Nowhere does this break down more predictably than in measurement.
Measurement, wielded wisely, is one of the most powerful tools an organization has. Done well, it creates learning. It invites curiosity. It shows people, in plain terms, whether what their team is doing is working well — which is the only honest starting point for improvement.
But far more often, measurement gets wielded as judgment. As a hunt for who’s responsible when a number goes red. Many organizations use measurement in a way that breeds cynicism and resistance rather than ownership — and once that pattern sets in, it’s remarkably hard to undo. Every new dashboard just confirms what people already suspect: we are here for monitoring, not improving. We are holding people accountable, not examining the processes contributing to the downward trend.
That word — accountability — is worth taking a pause on, because I think most organizations have it backwards.
Stacey Barr, whose work has positively influenced how I think about performance measurement as much as anyone’s, draws a distinction I come back to constantly: accountability shouldn’t be for hitting the target. It should be for three things the performance owner actually influences — measuring meaningfully, understanding the root causes behind the results, and initiating action when the evidence calls for it. This is the heart of what separates evidence-based leaders from leaders who simply collect and report data. Evidence-based leaders don’t ask their people to be accountable for a number. They ask them to be accountable for the discipline of understanding it and using it to create meaningful change.
Sit with how different that is from how most organizations run performance reviews. In reality, hitting or missing a target is often shaped by many forces— staffing, referral patterns, a funding change, a one-time occurrence, to name a few. Holding an individual accountable for the number itself teaches them to manage the number, not the work producing it. But measuring meaningfully, digging into why a result is trending how it is, and acting on what that understanding reveals — that’s within a leader’s influence, every time. Therefore, accountability built on those three things produces exactly what you’d hope for: teams who own their performance results, understand them, and seek continuous improvement. Accountability built on hitting a target number produces people who defend it, explain it away, or quietly tamper.
I recall a vivid example shared by a leader when in a retail pharmacy, about how clerks would answer the phone on the first ring and put each on hold because they were being held accountable for the measure of percent of calls answered within three rings. Why did corporate want this? They didn’t; it was simply a proxy measure for good customer service. And being put on hold certainly was not that. But staff were held to account for the number, and so they found a way to hit the number.
Part of what breeds cynicism with measurement in the first place is a missing line of sight. Without a clear line of results running from strategy all the way to individual teams, people default to activity — not because they’re disengaged, but because they haven’t defined what success actually looks like from where they sit. A frontline team can’t own a result it’s never been shown how to connect to. So they fall back on what they can control: staying busy, doing the work in front of them. Measurement that isn’t connected with a clear strategic line doesn’t just fail to inspire team ownership — it actively teaches people that activity is the goal, because activity is all that’s ever been visible to them.
When a number comes in low in your organization, what actually happens next? Does someone go looking for who to blame, or does someone go looking for what to understand? Does data arrive as a threat to be managed, or as an invitation to learn? The honest answer tells you more about your culture than any employee survey ever will. If that’s the process people experience, over and over, it becomes how they instinctively behave.
High-performing organizations use measurement as a feedback loop for improvement, not as a report card. A report card looks backward and assigns a grade. A feedback loop looks forward and asks what to do next. The difference isn’t semantic — it changes who leans into a poor performing number and who tries to bury it, or rationalize it.
The organizations that get this right don’t stumble into it, they build their systems with intention. In my work with organizations and leaders, the pattern among my most excellent clients is consistent. They become evidence-based leaders, building intentional processes in at least these five specific places:
- Setting strategic direction that’s genuinely clear about what success looks like — not a document that reads like “keep on keeping on,” but one with real tension between where the organization is and where it’s trying to go.
- Executing consistently toward that direction, so strategy is something people can see working day to day, not something that lives in a binder until the next planning cycle.
- Developing measurement that’s meaningful — evidence of the results that actually matter, connected clearly enough that a team can trace its own work back to it.
- Involving the people closest to the work in improvement efforts, because the people doing the work usually understand best the root causes of a result better than anyone reviewing a dashboard from a distance.
- Rewarding innovation and organizational learning — treating a well-reasoned innovation that failed as information, not a verdict on someone’s competence.
High performing organizations take a systems perspective: managing all parts of the organization as a unified whole, so that plans, processes, measures, and actions are consistent with each other rather than working against one another. Managing by fact where we are measuring and analyzing performance — not just reporting it upward and hoping it looks good. These are the disciplines evidence-based leaders practice.
None of this is complicated to describe. But it’s genuinely hard to build, with consistency across the organization, because it asks leaders to give up something that feels, in the moment, like control: the ability to point at a missed number and hold someone responsible for it. What you get in exchange for building this capability I describe is something more lasting and durable — teams who understand their own performance results well enough to improve them year over year, and who trust the organization enough to reveal the truth about where they stand relative to where they strive to be.
A few things worth sitting with:
- Accountability for a target breeds defensiveness. Accountability for the process breeds ownership.
- Hold people responsible for measuring meaningfully, uncovering root causes, and acting on what they learn — not for the number itself — and you’ll get teams of people who improve performance instead of people who manage the appearance.
- If your teams default to activity, check the line of sight before you check their motivation.
- The test of your measurement system isn’t whether the numbers look good. It’s what happens in the room when they don’t — report card, or feedback loop.
- You don’t need to redesign everything at once. Intentional process design at the leadership level ripples outward — strategic direction, execution, measurement, staff involvement – one deliberate choice at a time, interconnected over time.
So before the next culture initiative gets bantered around, ask the more useful question first: when a number in your organization comes in low, does the room ask for an explanation, or does it seek out an exploration?
In that answer is your culture.
The processes shape your culture — and the leaders willing to be evidence-based about building them — are where the real work lies.
Questions for Creating Your Excellence Advantage
✳️ What do you get when a key metric is trending in the wrong direction? An explanation or an exploration?
✳️ What is the positive ripple you are putting in place?
✳️ What do you see when you take the systems perspective?
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Kathy Letendre, President and Founder of Letendre & Associates, advises organizations and leaders to create their excellence advantage.
Contact Kathy by phone or text at 802-779-4315 or via email.