This week on CEO Daily Brief, I spoke with my friend John Frehse. John is a labor strategy expert, and one of the few people I know who can talk about cost-cutting with both depth and humanity. We’ve known each other for years, but somehow this conversation uncovered something we hadn’t said out loud before: in the current business environment, culture is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a temporary savings and a lasting transformation.
I had just come from a meeting with a leadership development firm that focuses on heart-based leadership. They’re the kind of people who talk about heartset and skillset. They lead with purpose and want to make work more human. I admire their mission, but they’re struggling to grow. Despite a loyal client base and ten years in the business, they’re seeing declining interest from new clients. When I asked why, the answer was clear: the market is asking for results. Culture matters, but performance is what gets attention.
That reality is showing up across the board. During COVID, companies had more freedom to prioritize employee wellbeing, delay layoffs, and experiment with culture-focused strategies. But John made an important point—there was always going to be a payback period. The grace has run out. Boards, investors, and executive teams are circling back to collect. The pressure is real. And that pressure is pushing leaders into a false choice: results or humanity.
The truth is you can’t have sustainable results without culture. You can cut costs. You can reorganize. You can implement new tools and processes. But if your culture isn’t aligned, the gains won’t last. You may save fifteen million dollars this year only to lose twenty million next year in turnover, confusion, or disengagement. Culture is what determines whether savings stick. It is what allows cost efficiencies to become business strategies, not short-term wins.
That’s what we work on every day at Culture Partners. We lead with outcomes. We help leaders operationalize strategy. But the way we do that—what actually makes it stick—is through culture. Culture captures the cost savings. It is not the thing you get to later, once the performance improves. It is how you improve performance to begin with.
John said it best: it is nice to do math in Excel. But that does not mean you have captured the value. You only capture value when your people understand the why, take ownership of the how, and commit to delivering results long-term. That is what culture makes possible. Not in theory—in practice. Not as a one-time initiative, but as a way of working.
So yes, make the case with numbers. Lead with business value. But do not forget what drives it. The organizations that succeed are the ones that understand this simple truth: culture is not a side conversation. It is the strategy. Culture captures the cost savings.
Elsewhere In Culture
When I wrote In Chaotic Times, Leaders Must Focus On Workplace Culture, I was responding to a growing tension I see across industries: the widening gap between how executives perceive the workplace and how employees experience it. The latest LinkedIn data shows employee confidence is falling, yet many leaders remain unaware of just how serious that trust gap has become. And when people don’t feel safe, they stop taking risks. They stop innovating. They stop caring. That’s not a generational flaw or a performance issue. It’s neuroscience. People in survival mode can’t be strategic. They can only react. When we ignore that reality, we end up adding more pressure and control, which only drives engagement further into the ground.
That’s why I push leaders to resist the Action Trap. More urgency is not the answer. Culture is. And not culture as perks or feel-good initiatives, but as belief systems and behavior patterns that drive results. I highlighted Service Express because they prove what’s possible when a company aligns on purpose, empowers ownership, and leads with story. At Culture Partners, we help organizations shift belief through intentional experiences that build clarity, alignment, and real accountability. The leaders who get this, who embrace adaptability instead of control, are the ones who will outlast the chaos. Because in times of change, culture is not a soft skill. It is a results strategy.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/business/2025/06/16/corporate-culture?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Most companies say they value innovation, trust, collaboration. But as this new Economist article shows, saying it does not make it so. By analyzing 1.4 million anonymous Glassdoor reviews, researchers found that when employees organically mentioned values like supportive or inclusive, those companies also had higher engagement and retention. It is not the poster on the wall. It is the experience. And employees are telling us, in their own words, whether culture is working or not.
This is why we always say culture is not what you say, it is what you do. At Culture Partners, we help organizations make those beliefs visible and measurable because if you cannot see it, you cannot change it. The real value of this article is not just the insights. It is the challenge it issues to every leader: stop assuming your people believe in your values. Measure it. Listen to the words they use. And if the story does not match your strategy, it is time to do the culture work.