You have probably seen it before. A leadership offsite produces five shiny new values. They get printed on posters, projected during the all-hands, maybe even etched into the lobby wall. Six months later, nothing has changed. People still avoid giving honest feedback. Decisions still get stuck in the same bottlenecks. Collaboration still means “I’ll cc you on the email.”
The problem isn’t that those values were wrong. The problem is that culture isn’t a set of beliefs — it’s a set of behaviors. And changing beliefs doesn’t automatically change what people do on a Tuesday afternoon.
This article lays out a behavioral science approach to culture change: one grounded in how humans actually form habits, respond to social cues, and sustain new ways of working. No motivational speeches required.
Why Most Culture Change Programs Fail
The vast majority of culture change initiatives share the same fatal flaw: they try to change how people think before changing what people do.
Here’s the typical playbook:
- Hire a consulting firm to run a culture assessment
- Identify a gap between “current culture” and “desired culture”
- Launch a communications campaign around new values
- Run a few workshops
- Hope for the best
Research from McKinsey found that 70% of culture transformation efforts fail. The reason isn’t a lack of effort or sincerity. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what culture actually is and how it changes.
The Belief-Behavior Fallacy
Most culture programs assume a linear chain: change beliefs first, and behavior will follow. Behavioral science tells us the opposite is often true. Behavior change frequently precedes belief change. When people start acting differently and experience positive outcomes, their beliefs shift to match their actions. This is the core insight from cognitive dissonance theory, first described by Leon Festinger in the 1950s.
In practical terms: you don’t need everyone to “buy in” to a new culture before you start. You need them to start doing one or two things differently. The buy-in follows.
The Abstraction Problem
“Be innovative.” “Put customers first.” “Act with integrity.” These are fine aspirations, but they aren’t instructions. They don’t tell anyone what to do differently at 10 AM on a Wednesday. Culture change dies in abstraction. It survives in specificity.
Understanding Culture: Edgar Schein’s Three-Level Model
To change culture effectively, you need to understand what you’re actually working with. Organizational psychologist Edgar Schein proposed the most durable model of organizational culture, organized in three levels:
Level 1: Artifacts (What You See)
These are the visible elements — office layout, dress code, how meetings run, what gets celebrated. They’re easy to observe but hard to interpret without context.
Level 2: Espoused Values (What People Say)
These are the stated beliefs, strategies, and philosophies. The values on the wall live here. They represent what the organization says it cares about.
Level 3: Basic Underlying Assumptions (What People Actually Believe)
These are the unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs that truly drive behavior. They’re the hardest to change because people don’t even realize they hold them.
Here’s the insight most culture programs miss: you can’t directly change Level 3. You can’t talk someone out of deeply held assumptions. But you can change Level 1 — the artifacts, the rituals, the daily practices — and when those changes stick, Levels 2 and 3 begin to shift.
This is the behavioral approach to culture change. Work on what people do, not what they think.
The Behavioral Approach to Culture Change
Instead of launching a grand “culture transformation,” a behavioral approach focuses on identifying and changing a small number of specific, observable behaviors. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Identify 3-5 Target Behaviors
Culture is too big to change all at once. Start by answering one question: What are the 3-5 specific behaviors that, if practiced consistently, would represent the culture we want?
These behaviors must be:
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- Observable — You can see or measure them happening
- Specific — Clear enough that two people would agree on what counts
- Repeatable — They happen frequently, not once a quarter
- Connected to outcomes — They link to business results people care about
Bad example: “Be more collaborative”
Good example: “Share a work-in-progress draft with at least one colleague before finalizing it”
Bad example: “Embrace feedback”
Good example: “Ask one specific question about your work in every 1:1 meeting”
The specificity is what makes this work. When people know exactly what to do, the friction of change drops dramatically.
Step 2: Design the Environment
Behavioral science teaches us that behavior is shaped far more by environment than by willpower. If you want a behavior to happen, make it easy. If you want a behavior to stop, make it hard.
This principle, often called choice architecture, applies directly to culture change:
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- Want more cross-team collaboration? Don’t write a memo about it. Restructure the weekly meeting agenda to include a 5-minute “what I learned from another team this week” slot.
- Want more honest feedback? Don’t run a trust workshop. Change the 1:1 template to include a required “one thing I would do differently” prompt.
- Want faster decisions? Don’t lecture about empowerment. Set a rule: any decision under $5,000 can be made without manager approval.
The key insight is that systems drive behavior more reliably than motivation. People respond to the structure around them. Change the structure, and you change the behavior at scale.
Step 3: Leverage Social Proof
Humans are deeply social animals. We look to others — especially people we respect and identify with — to determine what’s normal and acceptable. This is why culture is so sticky: once a norm is established, people conform to it automatically.
You can use social proof deliberately:
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- Make the target behavior visible. If you want people to share learnings, create a Slack channel where people post what they learned that week. Visibility creates conformity.
- Start with early adopters. Identify the 10-15% of people who are already doing the target behavior (or close to it). Amplify their stories. When others see respected peers behaving this way, it normalizes the behavior.
- Use data transparency. Share behavioral data at the team level. “73% of teams completed a retrospective this sprint” is more motivating than any pep talk.
Step 4: Reinforce Relentlessly
New behaviors are fragile. Without reinforcement, they fade within weeks. The behavioral science principle at work here’s operant conditioning: behaviors that are followed by positive consequences get repeated.
Effective reinforcement strategies include:
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- Immediate recognition. Acknowledge the behavior close to when it happens, not six months later in a performance review.
- Peer recognition. Recognition from colleagues is often more powerful than recognition from leaders because it signals genuine social acceptance.
- Progress visibility. Show people and teams their own behavioral data over time. Seeing progress is intrinsically motivating.
- Manager modeling. When managers practice the target behaviors publicly, it sends the strongest possible signal that this is how things work here now.
The 90-Day Culture Sprint
Grand multi-year culture transformation programs tend to collapse under their own weight. A more effective approach is the 90-day culture sprint — a focused, time-boxed effort to embed one or two new behaviors.
Weeks 1-2: Define and Baseline
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- Select 1-2 target behaviors (not more)
- Measure current frequency (how often is this behavior happening today?)
- Brief managers on their role as behavior models
- Set a clear, measurable 90-day goal
Weeks 3-4: Launch and Enable
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- Introduce the target behavior with clear, specific language
- Modify systems and processes to make the behavior easier (change meeting templates, update 1:1 guides, adjust team rituals)
- Equip managers with simple conversation starters
Weeks 5-8: Sustain and Amplify
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- Share early data on behavioral frequency
- Highlight stories of the behavior in action (social proof)
- Address friction points — what’s making the behavior harder than it needs to be?
- Conduct short pulse checks to track adoption
Weeks 9-12: Embed and Measure
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- Measure behavioral frequency against your baseline
- Identify which teams adopted and which did not (and why)
- Decide whether to continue reinforcing this behavior or add a new one
- Document what worked for the next sprint
The power of the sprint model is that it creates momentum through visible wins. When people see that a specific behavior actually changed in 90 days, they start believing that culture change is possible. That belief is far more valuable than any poster.
Measuring Culture Through Behavioral Indicators
You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and traditional culture metrics are notoriously soft. Annual engagement surveys capture sentiment, not behavior. They tell you how people feel, not what people do.
Behavioral indicators are different. They track the frequency of specific, observable actions. Examples:
| Cultural Attribute | Traditional Metric | Behavioral Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| Feedback culture | “I feel comfortable giving feedback” (survey) | Number of feedback exchanges per employee per month |
| Innovation | “We encourage new ideas” (survey) | Number of experiments launched per quarter |
| Collaboration | “Teams work well together” (survey) | Frequency of cross-team document sharing |
| Accountability | “People follow through” (survey) | Percentage of action items completed within committed timelines |
Behavioral indicators are harder to collect but dramatically more useful. They tell you whether culture is actually changing, not just whether people think it should.
Platforms like GWork are built around this principle — tracking behavioral frequency rather than attitudinal surveys to give organizations a real-time view of whether target behaviors are actually taking hold. In one implementation with MTS, this approach led to a 46% improvement in feedback frequency within the first quarter.
The Role of Managers as Culture Carriers
If culture change has a single point of leverage, it’s the front-line manager. Research consistently shows that the manager is the most significant influence on an employee’s daily experience. They set the norms, model the behaviors, and control many of the environmental cues that drive behavior.
What Managers Need to Do (Specifically)
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- Model the target behavior visibly. If the target behavior is sharing work-in-progress for feedback, the manager should be the first to do it — publicly and repeatedly.
- Reinforce the behavior in 1:1s. Ask about it. “When was the last time you asked a colleague for feedback on something you were working on?” This simple question signals that the behavior matters.
- Remove obstacles. Managers are uniquely positioned to spot and fix environmental friction. If people aren’t sharing work because they’re afraid of being judged, the manager can address that directly.
- Use team rituals. Weekly team meetings, retrospectives, and stand-ups are the primary vehicles for embedding new behavioral norms. Managers who redesign these rituals drive the most culture change.
What Managers Need to Receive
Managers can’t carry culture change without support. They need:
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- Clarity on exactly which behaviors to model and reinforce. Not “be more innovative” but “ask your team one question per week about an experiment they’re running.”
- Simple tools. A nudge at the right moment — before a 1:1, before a team meeting — is more useful than a 40-page culture playbook. This is where behavioral nudge platforms, like GWork, can make a real difference by delivering timely, contextual prompts that keep managers on track without adding to their workload.
- Their own behavioral data. Managers respond to data about their own behavior just as much as anyone else. Showing a manager that they gave recognition twice last month (compared to a team average of six times) is a powerful motivator.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Trying to change too many behaviors at once. Three to five target behaviors is the maximum for an organization-wide effort. At the team level, start with one.
Confusing communication with change. Sending an email about new values isn’t culture change. It’s communication. Change happens when people do something differently, repeatedly, over time.
Ignoring the existing culture. Every organization already has a culture — a set of behavioral norms that are deeply embedded. You aren’t building from scratch; you’re redirecting. Understand what’s working and build on it.
Skipping measurement. If you aren’t tracking behavioral frequency before and after, you have no way to know whether your effort worked. Gut feeling isn’t a strategy.
Declaring victory too early. Behaviors become habits after roughly 66 days of consistent repetition, according to research from University College London. A behavior that has been practiced for three weeks is still fragile. Give it time.
Culture Change Starts Monday
Culture change isn’t mysterious, and it’s not soft. It’s behavioral change at organizational scale. The organizations that succeed at it are the ones that stop trying to change what people believe and start changing what people do.
Pick 3-5 specific, observable behaviors. Redesign the environment to make those behaviors easy. Use social proof to make them normal. Reinforce them relentlessly through managers and systems. Measure behavioral frequency, not sentiment.
That’s the playbook. It’s not glamorous, and it won’t fit on a poster. But it works.
