Chuck Gose is the founder of Icology, a community for internal communications pros. With hundreds of members across 6 countries, Icology gives internal comms professionals access to the insights, events and support they need to thrive in their roles.
Chuck recently spoke to CEO, Ann Melinger, about bink’s Culture at Work Study. They discussed in-depth:
The story behind the study
Why it matters in this moment
How internal comms teams can leverage the results
The culture mistakes leaders are making right now
Read their interview below and join the study before it closes on May 20th. It takes 15 minutes and is completely anonymous.
Chuck Gose: Every company claims culture is a priority. What made you decide this moment specifically needed a formal research study?
Ann Melinger: In recent years, culture has never been more important. You’re absolutely right – every company claims culture is a priority. Leaders are talking about it constantly. It’s a topic on the cover of Harvard Business Review and plastered all over LinkedIn. There are massive industry events dedicated to culture.
But on the other side of the coin, culture has never been more abstract. In many organizations, it’s still not being managed with the same rigor as other business drivers. It’s discussed in terms of values and engagement, not in terms of systems, incentives and performance outcomes.
The gap between claiming that culture matters and actually doing anything structural about it has never been wider.
We saw an opportunity to step back and ask: What is actually shaping culture right now, and how does it hold up under pressure? Not just inside one company, but across organizations. Our hope is that the insights this research uncovers can help close the gap between intention and action.
CG: The premise of this study is that culture is what leaders, systems and incentives reinforce and not what’s written on a wall (so cliché). Where do you see the most obvious gap between stated values and actual behavior?
AM: When it comes to core values, most companies talk about collaboration, accountability and innovation. But when you look at performance management, incentives and decision-making, the signals are often very different.
So, you end up with environments where:
Collaboration is a stated value, but individual performance is what’s rewarded
Accountability is emphasized, but top performers are given exceptions
Innovation is encouraged, but risk-taking is quietly penalized
That’s where culture becomes very clear to employees, regardless of what’s written on the wall.
People aren’t reading the values poster. They’re watching who gets promoted, who gets protected and what behavior gets excused in a crunch. Employees notice those inconsistencies, even if they go undiscussed.
CG: “Operationalizing culture” is the phrase you’re using. What does that actually look like in practice? What does it look like when an organization is doing it badly?
AM: At its core, operationalizing culture means aligning what you say with how the organization actually runs. In practice, that shows up in things like:
How leaders make and communicate decisions (both in terms of the messages they share and HOW they share them)
How performance is evaluated and rewarded (both formally and informally)
How trade-offs are handled under pressure
What behaviors are consistently reinforced or corrected
When it’s done well, culture becomes predictable. Employees understand what’s expected and how to succeed. But when it’s done poorly, culture becomes ambiguous. Different leaders send different signals. Systems contradict stated priorities. And employees are left to interpret what really matters on their own.
The most common version of doing it badly isn’t neglect. It’s treating culture as a communications problem—which often looks like launching a values refresh with beautiful new language and visuals, then changing nothing about how decisions get made or how people are evaluated.
In those instances, organizations might think they’re operationalizing culture, but they’re really just branding it.
CG: You’re targeting people who own culture, internal comms, HR and employee experience. Do those groups typically agree on what culture is and who owns it? Or is that ownership conversation messier than it looks from the outside?
AM: Oh, it’s a whole lot messier than it looks from the outside. Many organizations say culture is “owned by everyone,” which in practice often means no one is fully accountable for how it operates. HR may focus on programs and policies, while Internal Comms may focus on messaging and alignment. Meanwhile, senior leaders are shaping culture through their decisions and actions (whether they see it that way or not).
So, even if these groups agree on what culture is, they may not have full control or visibility to be able to shape it.
Without coordinated collaboration between the functions that impact culture, along with clear and consistent support from senior leadership, culture can become a pain point that nobody is empowered to solve.
CG: When culture breaks down, what do you think leaders misread first? Is it a data problem, a mindset problem, or something else?
AM: They tend to misread it as a communication or engagement issue, when it’s often a systems and ownership issue.
Leaders will try to fix culture by clarifying values or asking the comms team to communicate differently. But if the underlying incentives, expectations or leadership behaviors aren’t aligned, those efforts don’t stick.
Part of why leaders reach for communication as the fix is that it’s visible and fast, and it doesn’t require them to examine their own behavior or disrupt systems that are producing results, even if those results come with cultural costs.
And that’s where organizations can spend a lot of time addressing symptoms instead of root causes. That’s really the basis of this research: to better understand those root causes behind culture breakdowns.
CG: You designed this study to capture “what leaders won’t say out loud.” That’s a bold claim. What do you think people know but aren’t saying?
AM: Well, I don’t want to make TOO many assumptions before we see the data, but I believe there are several hard truths that leaders often sense but don’t always articulate:
That results are sometimes prioritized over the organization’s stated values, and there’s a quiet discomfort about it that’s rarely named
That certain behaviors are tolerated because they drive performance
That culture looks different depending on where you sit in the organization
That under pressure, the real culture becomes visible in ways that are hard to walk back
CG: Internal communicators tend to be the ones translating culture to employees — they’re not always the ones setting it. How does this research serve that audience specifically?
AM: I hope this research does a lot to serve our community – that’s the goal! IC pros are often asked to translate culture into something employees can understand and act on, but they’re doing that within systems they don’t fully control.
That’s a difficult position: being asked to make a narrative believable to an audience that will immediately test it against their lived experience.
This research is designed to give IC professionals something they don’t often have: external data to bring into strategic conversations.
Specifically, I hope it will help internal communicators by:
Validating patterns across organizations that can be used to bolster strategy and resource requests
Making the case that culture breakdown is not a messaging issue, but a deeper systemic issue
Connecting culture transformation work to real business outcomes
CG: What finding would actually surprise you? Is there conventional wisdom about culture you’re quietly hoping the data challenges?
More realistically, I’m curious about where alignment does exist, and why.
There’s a lot of conversation about where culture breaks down. We’re equally interested in understanding where it holds up and what those organizations are doing differently.
The conventional wisdom I’d most like to see disrupted is the idea that culture is primarily a people problem – that it’s about hiring the right individuals and managing out the wrong ones.
I think the data will show it’s a systems problem. The right people in broken systems will still produce broken behaviors.
CG: If organizations get the research and sit on it, what’s the cost? Are there consequences to knowing the gap exists and doing nothing?
AM: The cost is misalignment that compounds over time. When there’s a gap between intent and reality, it doesn’t stay static. It shows up in:
Inconsistent decision-making
Confusion about priorities
Erosion of trust
Slower execution
And ultimately, performance suffers.
What’s more challenging is that people usually feel those gaps before they can clearly describe them. So doing nothing doesn’t maintain the status quo. It allows the gap to widen.
And once leaders have seen the data, inaction becomes a choice, and employees, communicators and HR professionals are acutely aware of whether leadership is choosing to act.
The most dangerous moment in culture work isn’t ignorance. It’s informed inaction.
CG: What’s the one question you wish more leaders were asking themselves about their own culture right now? And aren’t asking?
AM:
“What are we consistently reinforcing through our decisions, systems and behaviors, and is that what we intend?”
Because culture is already being shaped every day, but few leaders pause to examine whether their culture is being shaped intentionally, or simply by default, one unexamined decision at a time.
