We’ve all heard about or experienced the effect of company culture on the success of a business. Most of us have worked for businesses where the culture was very clearly a contributing factor or where it has been a detractor. It’s also said that there’s no recipe for good company culture, and that’s true. There is no one recipe which will guarantee success. There are too many factors which are not under the control of leadership for the word “recipe” to be an applicable term. There are specific behaviours and goals which can transform company culture into a force for good though, behaviours which will give consistent positive results.

In fact, there are some things which leaders can do which will have a positive effect on their employees, both personally and professionally. The relationships between employees will improve and while it isn’t a goal of leadership, their relationships out of work will improve too. The focus of employees on goals that matter to the business will improve, their willingness, ability and motivation to work together as a team and to be in support of business goals will improve too. The more and the longer these behaviours are engaged in by the leadership team the greater the improvement will be. The leadership team isn’t immune to these behaviours, the effects of these behaviours will apply to them too.

There are some secondary benefits to the business which will come from these behaviours in leadership. One is that the term of employment of most employees will increase. Staff turnover costs business in ways which are both quantifiable and unquantifiable, both cost types are reduced when turnover is reduced. Similarly, there are costs which are rooted in the experience which customers have, both quantifiable and unquantifiable, marketing costs as one example, which are positively affected by the effect of these behaviours.

The primary reason, the first focus of these behaviours is that they will have a positive effect on the top and bottom line of the business. This isn’t just an assertion, it’s supported by real world experience, businesses have been turned around by engaging in these behaviours.

They’re often not easy, and even more difficult to apply consistently, but that’s ok, practice makes perfect. The set of behaviours has been collected from various sources, over time. One source is a form of therapy called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and has been adapted for leadership by AVICT. CBT is a type of treatment used to treat personality disorders and other ailments. Others are experience and various leadership courses and literature, but the primary focus of this series of articles will be those behaviours which are known to produce predictable, consistent and marked positive results in psychological treatment of certain conditions.

Company culture is defined and driven by the types of behaviours which are engaged in, allowed, enabled, promoted or similarly, discouraged, disallowed, or not enabled in the business. The principle behind CBT is that human decisions are arrived at through a cycle which starts with thoughts, moves on to emotions, moves on to results of the emotions and then we act based on those results.

I’ll stress this again, to implement these leadership tenets will be difficult for some. While some of these things might be second nature for some, for others they will be difficult to achieve, hard work to reach, complex to understand and some will feel that they are slow to produce results. At times it will feel like they are not immediate enough in their effect, at times even those who are highly practiced and who have relied on these techniques for a long time will be unsure about how effective they will be this time and with the individual in front of them in that instant. The data is both unambiguous and extensive, the effectiveness is clear and predictable.

Doing these things is a transformative force, but it takes time to affect that transformation. Especially in companies where the culture isn’t as constructive as one may want it to be. In the decidedly more intensive context of therapy, CBT is a treatment which unravels individually, one at a time, the beliefs behind behaviours in specific situations and which will drive the decisions which lead to the behaviours, even where those decisions are based on heuristics, based on ideas that the individual isn’t acutely aware of, where the decisions aren’t entirely conscious. CBT is able to dramatically improve the lives of people suffering from personality disorders able to put them in control over their actions and in turn their lives.

In the context of a work environment, the same detrimental beliefs, often called cognitive distortions, will affect the way in which people take decisions, how they interact with each other or how they take on tasks. It’ll change how open they are, how willing they are to share ideas, take responsibility, their willingness to improve and by implication to change, and their willingness to take risks.

There’s too much to cover in a single article while getting into enough detail to make clear what the actions that a leader can take are. How to arrive at the position where these behaviours are easier and what needs to be overcome both in the workplace and personally to enable these behaviours. This subject will be unpacked in some detail in a series of articles which will be published in the coming weeks.

 

 

Company Culture Defines Business Success

Company culture isn’t just an abstract concept or a secondary concern, it’s a direct determinant of business success. A deliberate and strategically driven culture can determine the success of a business to the same degree as cash flow or investment or availability of other resources can, in fact more where those things are in short supply.

Culture has a strong influence over the decisions and actions taken in a business, the level of commitment, the focus, the amount of responsibility taken, the willingness of people in the business to share ideas, communicate well, show good leadership and also over how willing people are to work towards the business and each others goals.

This isn’t about the vague notions of a “positive workplace” or “employee engagement.”, the kind that various organizations will “measure” and make known to management or the public. Organizations which won’t be named here, but which have methods to survey staff that are usually somewhat reviled by staff who often toe the corporate line rather than giving authentic answers. Initiatives which are not founded and driven by a sincere desire to devise, develop and drive strategic culture tend to be ineffective.

Culture is a direct and controllable force, driven by specific leadership behaviors. When executed correctly, it doesn’t just create a slightly better work environment, it fundamentally reshapes how a business operates. The impact is not marginal; it’s exponential. Businesses that implement these principles have seen teams which were struggling go on to achieve the output of competitors four times their size in staff contingent. Companies on the brink of failure have reversed course within two years, not through superficial tweaks, but through the deliberate engineering of a culture that drives success. Companies who have gone through difficult times, downsized or restructured to survive, become large and very profitable businesses.

 

Culture Is Not an Outcome—It’s a Leadership Strategy

One of the most persistent myths about company culture is that it simply evolves based on the people in an organization. While individuals contribute to culture, they do not define it. Culture is engineered by leadership, whether consciously or unconsciously.

When left to chance, culture often develops in ways that limit efficiency, slow decision-making, and create misalignment with business goals. But when deliberately designed to do so, it transforms how teams operate:

• Employees become more engaged, proactive, and accountable.
• Collaboration is driven by healthy conflict and friction, of ideas not agendas, with high levels of trust and shared ownership.
• Strategic goals become more than just metrics; they drive everyday decision-making.
• The business gains a competitive edge not through sheer workforce size, but through effectiveness.

This shift doesn’t take decades. When leadership commits to these principles, and manages the change, the impact can be felt within months, with long-term results already solidifying over one to two years.

 

The Business Case for Deliberately Engineered Culture

A well-designed company culture has direct, measurable business benefits:

• Operational Efficiency: Businesses that apply these leadership behaviors have outperformed competitors by orders of magnitude. Teams a fraction of the size produce results that have in real examples, required four times the workforce.
• Cost Reduction: Lower staff contingent and also lower staff turnover reduces both direct hiring costs and the deeper costs of lost institutional knowledge.
• Customer Experience: A culture that drives success leads to a more consistent, deliberate and precise customer experience, instituting marketing and customer acquisition methods which reduce direct costs but also change the competitiveness of the business.
• Financial Impact: This isn’t about incremental gains, when properly executed, these cultural shifts lead to business-wide transformation, not just a few percentage points of improvement.

 

The Science Behind Cultural Transformation

The principles behind this transformation are not based on intuition or management trends. They are grounded in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) a structured approach originally developed to treat psychological disorders but highly effective in leadership and business transformation.

CBT is built on a fundamental concept: human behavior is shaped by a repeating cycle of thoughts, emotions, and responses. When leaders learn to recognize and shift these patterns—both in themselves and in their teams—they gain control over how their company functions.

AVICT has adapted CBT techniques specifically for leadership, creating a framework that enables businesses to systematically replace counterproductive behaviors with those that drive measurable success. This is not theoretical; it has been tested in real-world organizations with consistent, repeatable results.

 

Implementation: The Challenge and the Reward

Transforming culture through leadership is not easy. It requires conscious effort, discipline, and a willingness to rethink long-standing habits. Some leaders will struggle to implement these changes consistently, and there will be moments when the approach feels counterintuitive or difficult. But the data is both clear and extensive: when done correctly, these methods work.

In therapy, CBT has been proven to help individuals break free from deep-seated patterns of self-sabotage, enabling them to take control of their lives. In a business context, the same principles apply—leaders who implement these strategies enable their teams to make better decisions, communicate more effectively, and execute with greater precision.

What’s Next?

This isn’t just an abstract theory, it’s a practical, proven framework that can be applied to any business. In the coming weeks, we’ll break down:

• The specific leadership behaviors that drive cultural transformation.
• The key challenges leaders face when implementing them.
• The step-by-step approach to embedding these behaviors into daily operations.
• Challenges one might face and how to overcome some of them.
• Implementation of structures which guide and reinforce culture.

 

Culture isn’t a byproduct of business success, it’s a cause of it. And when engineered deliberately, it has the power to take any business from struggling to thriving in record time.