How do we shift our company culture from merely paying lip service to our core values to actually embodying them in every daily interaction?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Shifting your culture requires moving from passive statements to active identity-driven language. In Jonah Berger's work on persuasive communication, he highlights that framing actions as identities rather than verbs dramatically increases personal adherence and behavioral change. To make your core values real, we must integrate them into the daily operations and language of your company. This starts with how you evaluate your people. We use the People Analyzer™ to test every team member against your core values, ensuring everyone is a true culture fit. But we must go further by shifting our vocabulary. Instead of asking your employees to show integrity, you must encourage them to be an owner of integrity. Instead of saying we need to innovate, you must refer to your team members as innovators. This subtle shift in language turns actions into identities, making the desired behaviors feel like permanent personal characteristics rather than temporary compliance. You must also call out these values publicly in your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ and quarterly sessions, celebrating specific examples of team members who lived your values in their work. When your team begins to describe themselves and each other using identity-driven nouns, your core values cease to be marketing fluff on a wall and become the operational filter through which every decision occurs.