The values launch goes well. There’s an event, a video from the chief executive, new posters and a page in the recruitment pack. A year later, someone asks what has changed. People can name the values. Nobody is quite sure they behave any differently.
I recently spoke with the change team at a large organisation that had done almost everything right on paper. Their values had been turned into behaviours. Every part of the business had champions, an adoption plan and a monthly check-in. What they were still looking for was the “how”: the practical mechanics that get people doing the behaviours, in their own work, often enough for them to stick.
Why don’t company values change how leaders behave?
Because a value describes what an organisation cares about, and leaves each person to work out what to do differently on Monday morning.
Words like integrity, care and one team are easy to agree with and easy to read in different ways. Each leader fills in the meaning for themselves, usually in a way that matches what they already do.
There’s also evidence that stating values isn’t what counts. A study of large US companies found that the values firms proclaimed had no link with how they performed. What did matter was whether employees saw their senior managers as trustworthy and ethical. That’s an association, not proof of cause, but it points where every values programme ends up: what people see their leaders do.
What is a culture wave?
A culture wave is when a lot of people do the same thing at the same time, so the culture moves with them.
Most leadership development works the other way. A few people go on training, often away from their teams. They come back with new ideas and a real intention to use them, and they walk straight back into the culture they left. Nobody around them has changed, the old way of doing things is still what’s expected, and within a few weeks most of what they learned has quietly gone.
A wave changes the numbers. Every leader in an area, or across the organisation, works through the same individual activities in the same weeks. Each person’s practice is their own, with their own team and their own situations. But they’re all practising the same thing at once, so the culture they return to each day is moving too.
A value becomes culture when enough people practise it, at the same time, where the work actually happens.
Why do people slip back after training?
Because the culture they return to is a shared habit, and one person can’t shift a shared habit on their own.
In my experience, the people who come back from a good programme rarely lack intention. What they lack is company. If their peers and their own manager carry on as before, the new behaviour looks odd, gets no response and fades.
The research on learning transfer agrees. A review of 89 studies found that support from managers and a supportive climate at work were among the factors most closely linked to whether training got used at all.
Research on social conventions points the same way. In an online experiment, once a committed group reached about a quarter of the people involved, it consistently overturned the established way of doing things, and smaller groups generally failed. That was a naming game between strangers, not leaders at work, so treat it as a direction and not a formula. It does suggest why a handful of trained people is often not enough, and why changing the numbers matters.
What does social constructivism have to do with culture change?
Social constructivism holds that people build their understanding through interaction with others, so what a value really means at work gets settled in conversations between people, not in a document.
The idea goes back to the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who argued that we first make sense of things with other people, and only then hold that understanding as our own. Later researchers, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, applied the same thinking to work: people learn by taking part in the shared practice around them, and newcomers learn by joining in with what’s already happening.
Read that way, the problem with training a few becomes obvious. A leader can come back with a new understanding of “integrity”, but the meaning their team works with is still being made in the same conversations, by the same people, in the same way as before. One person has changed. The shared meaning hasn’t.
A culture wave works on the shared meaning directly. When everyone in an area is thinking about the same value in the same fortnight, the conversations change too. People compare notes, notice each other trying things, and argue about what the value looks like in their own work. That’s where the new meaning gets built.
These are theories of how people learn, not trials of culture programmes. The culture wave is our application of them.
How do you embed values in everyday work?
By building the practice into the flow of work, because that’s where values are tested and where shared meaning is made, and it’s the only realistic way to reach everyone at once.
“Learning in the flow of work” is a phrase the industry analyst Josh Bersin popularised: short pieces of learning built into the work people already do, instead of separate courses. It’s also how practice moves from the workshop into the workplace. For values, it matters more than for most things. Values show up in ordinary moments: how a decision gets explained, whether a problem is raised early, what happens when someone gets something wrong. A workshop can describe those moments. It can’t put people in them.
There’s a practical reason too. In my experience, the first objection to any development plan is “we can’t take them off the floor”, and the second is a budget that covers a fraction of the leaders who need it. Activities that happen inside the work deal with both. Nobody is released, and the same activity can reach every leader in the same week.
What does a culture wave look like in practice?
Every leader in an area works through the same short set of individual activities in the same fortnight, each in their own work, with their own people.
Take values. Trust Leader’s purpose activities include a playlist called Values in Action, which helps a leader work out what they value and how they’ll act on it. Done by one leader on a programme, it’s useful personal reflection that their team may never hear about.
Now run it as a wave. Every leader in the department works through the same activities in the same two weeks. Each ends up with their own answer to “how will I act on this?”, in their own words and their own situations. But they’ve all been answering the same question at the same time. The conversations about it start happening in every team without anyone having to organise them, and the shared meaning starts to shift.
Nothing extra has to be organised for that to happen. No workshop, no team session, no one taken off the floor. Each activity is small and individual, but because so many people are doing the same one at once, they add up. The wave is built from individual practice, multiplied.
How do you turn a value into something people can practise?
Describe what someone would actually see a person doing when they live the value.
Take integrity. On its own, it gives a leader nothing to do. Described as behaviour, it becomes:
- Saying a deadline is at risk before anyone asks.
- Explaining the reason for a decision, including the parts people won’t like.
- Doing what you said you’d do, or saying early that you can’t.
Each of those can be practised this week, noticed by someone else and recorded afterwards.
Many values come down to how people treat each other. Those land well on the behaviours that strengthen trust, because they answer the questions people are already asking about their leaders, such as “Do they believe I’ll do what I said?” and “Do they believe I act with their interests in mind?” Values about innovation or ambition may need behaviours that have little to do with trust between people, so it’s worth deciding early which of your values the trust behaviours carry.
How long does it take for a new behaviour to stick?
Weeks to months of steady repetition, which is longer than most programmes allow for.
In a well-known study, people chose one simple eating, drinking or exercise habit to repeat every day in the same setting. The time it took for the habit to feel automatic varied enormously from one person to the next, from a few weeks to most of a year. Leading people is far more complex than any of those.
So a culture wave needs a rhythm that runs for months, with a fresh focus every few weeks. A launch followed by silence won’t carry it.
How do you know the culture wave is working?
Look at two things: how many people are practising, and what changed because of it.
A wave makes the first easy to see. You can count how many leaders in an area worked through the same activities in the same window, and where the wave is building or has stalled.
The second is a different question. A leader completing an activity is activity. A team member saying they now hear about problems a week earlier is impact. In my experience, programmes often report the first and hope it implies the second, so gather both and label them clearly.
Most of this evidence is the leader’s own account of what they did and what happened. Because a wave runs across many people in the same window, those accounts are dated, specific and comparable, and patterns across a whole area tell you far more than any single entry.
What happens to people who join after the wave starts?
They join it. A new starter learns the culture by taking part in what’s already happening around them, so the wave becomes their induction.
Many organisations introduce values through a recruitment pack or induction, which gets people as far as awareness. If what they then see around them doesn’t match what they were promised, the gap does its own damage. When a wave is running, new joiners arrive into an organisation where the behaviours are already visible and can pick up the current focus alongside everyone else.
Should values be part of performance reviews?
Not at first. Embed the behaviours, then decide whether to formalise them.
Practice needs room to get things wrong. If a leader’s first attempts at a new behaviour are scored in an appraisal, they’ll play safe and do what looks good rather than what’s useful. This kind of practice can support someone who is struggling, as part of their development, but it doesn’t belong in formal performance processes. Once the behaviours are common practice, an organisation is in a much better position to decide what, if anything, belongs in a review.
Who designs a culture wave?
A Certified Practitioner. Certification is for the people who design the practice: working out which behaviours carry each of an organisation’s values, choosing the individual activities, and sequencing them into bespoke Behaviour Playlists so every leader gets the right practice, in the right order.
A Practitioner can already assign the same pre-built Behaviour Playlist to a whole group of leaders, with each person working through it in their own work. That’s enough to start a small wave on a single behaviour. Designing a wave around an organisation’s own values, and keeping it moving with a fresh focus every few weeks, takes the judgement that certification is built to develop.
Certified is open for registration of interest.
Where would a wave start in your organisation?
The values are usually already written. The adoption plan often exists too. What’s usually missing is the moment when every leader, in the same week, does the same specific thing differently inside the work they were already doing.
If every leader in one of your teams worked on the same value next fortnight, what conversation would you expect to hear in the corridor a month later?