Culture as a competitive advantage: from discourse to discipline
- Jul 14
- 4 min read
In most companies, culture is talked about more than it is managed. It’s mentioned at meetings, printed on values posters, and included in annual reports. In our experience, we’ve seen that few organizations treat it in practice with the same rigor as their business, financial, or productivity plans. And that difference comes at a high cost.
Sixty percent of cultural initiatives fail because they are never integrated into the management system or the incentives that guide behavior (Harvard Business Review). In other words, most cultural efforts die on a PowerPoint slide.
Companies that do succeed in transforming their culture do so because they understand a simple truth:
Culture is not a slogan; it is a management mechanism.
And like any mechanism, it requires rules, metrics, and discipline.
Incentives that speak louder than words
In corporate culture, what is rewarded carries more weight than what is stated. If you want to foster collaboration but bonuses remain tied solely to individual results, the message is contradictory. If you seek accountability but promotions are based on seniority or personal connections, the official culture loses out to the actual one.
According to BCG, when cultural metrics are included in incentive systems, the likelihood of successful change triples. It’s not about filling dashboards with soft KPIs, but rather about choosing two or three indicators that matter and that represent the behavior you want to reinforce: for example, internal NPS, fulfillment of cross-functional commitments, or contributions to projects outside one’s own area.
Culture doesn’t change with posters or speeches—it changes when it affects employees’ paychecks, careers, and recognition.
Middle managers: the true point of transmission
In many cultural change processes, boards of directors and C-level executives focus on leading by example and communicating the new narrative. This is important, but it’s not enough.
In reality, culture is lived out in daily interactions, in relationships with direct supervisors, and in the decisions about priorities, permissions, and recognition that are made every day.
That is why middle managers are the most critical link in the chain. Gallup shows that investing in middle managers reduces unplanned turnover by 25% and increases the likelihood that the new culture will be embedded in day-to-day operations.
If the CEO declares, “We want more collaboration,” but the department head continues to reward those who focus solely on maximizing their own numbers, the culture will not change. Cultural change requires training, support, and evaluation of these middle managers with the same rigor with which an income statement is analyzed.
Measuring the intangible
One of the main excuses for not managing culture is that “it can’t be measured.”
Indeed, culture isn’t measured with the same precision as a balance sheet, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be managed.
Companies that do it well develop a limited set of metrics:
Internal NPS, which measures employees’ willingness to recommend the company as a place to work.
Cross-functional collaboration, which can be measured by participation in cross-functional projects or through specific surveys.
Fulfillment of personal leadership commitments, reviewed quarterly.
What's important is not to measure everything, but to measure what’s essential and make it visible to executive committees. When culture appears on the agenda as regularly as the budget, it stops being mere rhetoric and becomes actual management.
Culture as a driver of results
Organizations with strong cultures don’t just retain more talent. They also generate better results. Forbes has shown that a strong culture can account for up to a 20% difference in profitability among comparable companies.
The explanation is simple:
Aligned teams make decisions faster, face less friction, and show greater resilience in the face of crises.
Culture doesn’t just make work life “more pleasant”; it creates a competitive advantage that’s hard to replicate.
What doesn’t work
It’s worth being clear about what doesn’t make an impact:
Symbolic campaigns without changes to incentives. They serve to inspire for a few weeks, but their impact fades.
Declaring generic values (“innovation,” “collaboration,” “respect”) without observable behaviors to back them up.
Outsourcing culture to the HR department, as if it were a side project rather than a core management system.
Culture is lived out in every business decision, not on a poster in the office.
The main question
Culture is neither a “soft” issue nor an afterthought. It is a driver of results as concrete as pricing or productivity. The question every C-level executive should ask isn’t “what values do we want to declare,” but rather, “what behaviors are we rewarding and correcting today?”
Because culture isn’t declared—it’s designed, measured, and managed.
Does your company manage its culture with the same rigor as it does its results? If your stated values aren’t reflected in incentives, decisions, and behaviors, it’s time to review your management system.
At SummaPartners, we help turn culture into a competitive advantage by aligning leadership, incentives, and work practices. Contact us.
About the author
Juan José Varela is a partner at SummaPartners and has more than 15 years of experience leading strategic planning, restructuring, organizational design, and commercial strategy
projects.