Behaviors, Symbols, Systems

Theory & origin

Codified by culture consultant Carolyn Taylor in Walking the Talk (2005) and standard practice in culture work since. Culture is "the way things are actually done around here," and it is taught to every employee daily through three broadcast channels. Behaviors: what leaders do, tolerate, and interrupt, which outweighs anything they say. Symbols: what gets celebrated, who gets promoted, how space and time are allocated, and what the CEO opens the town hall with. Systems: the KPIs, budgets, approval chains, and above all incentives that make the desired behavior either the path of least resistance or a daily act of heroism. The model's sharp edge is diagnostic. When espoused values and actual culture diverge, the contradiction is always findable in one or more levers, and it is usually systems. It also explains why most culture programs fail: they are symbol-only campaigns, posters and workshops, launched into systems that keep paying for the old behavior.

Key components

The parts at a glance. Click any term for the full definition, a field example, and the common failure, in the model below.

How a consultant runs it

1. 01 Translate the aspiration into observable behavior first. "Collaborative" is a poster word. "Shares the pipeline data before being asked" is a behavior you can audit.
2. 02 Audit all three levers against that behavior: what leaders actually do (calendars, meeting openings), what gets celebrated and promoted, and what the incentive plan actually pays for.
3. 03 Fix systems first or nothing else survives. One incentive plan quietly contradicting the message outweighs a year of communication.
4. 04 Choreograph a small number of loud symbols: the pet metric a leader publicly retires, the first promotion under the new criteria. Symbols are cheap, and they travel further than memos.
5. 05 Make leader behavior contractual: a handful of named, visible commitments per executive, reviewed like any other target. A tolerated exception at the top resets the culture faster than anything below it.

Worked example

Bank Nusantara declares "customer first." Eighteen months later NPS is flat and the phrase is a running joke on the branch floor. The three-lever audit finds why: executive calendars show 4% of time on anything customer-facing, 13 of the last 15 town halls opened with financials, and the branch incentive plan weights sales volume at 90% with no service-quality component at all. The fix runs through the levers in reverse order: the incentive plan gets a 30% service-quality weight, town halls now open with one real customer case, and every executive takes two frontline customer shifts per quarter, publicly. Nothing else in the program changes. Two quarters later NPS is up 11 points, and, more telling, branch staff have started escalating customer problems upward again, because doing so stopped being career-negative.

Common pitfalls

1. 01 Symbol-only programs: the poster, the mug, and the launch video, with the systems left untouched
2. 02 Leaving one contradicting system in place, which outvotes the entire rest of the effort
3. 03 Leadership exempting itself, which every employee reads as the real policy
4. 04 Declaring victory at launch. Culture change is judged in year three, not month three.
5. 05 Copying an admired company's culture instead of aligning your own three levers

Sample deliverable

One real engagement, start to finish. Watch the numbers travel from raw input, onto the chart, into the finished artifact.