Most leaders intuitively know that their people are the business, and most are willing to spend real money to act on that conviction, which is why building a happy and high-performing culture has become such a non-negotiable line item on the budget.
However, in practice this is how it plays out for most of us.
As the team gets stretched and engagement begins to dip, someone in the leadership group signs off on a culture initiative of some kind, whether that is a speaker, a personality test, or a team off-site. In reality, most of that spend produces a flicker of feeling for a week or two, leaves almost no visible trace by the next quarter, and subsequently trains the team to be distrustful about the next initiative before it has even been announced.
If you have run a business with more than 20 people in it, you have probably been on more than one side of that loop, whether as the person signing off the spend, the team member sitting through the workshop, or the one wondering afterwards whether any of it ever does anything.
The problem is not that the activity itself is bad, but that the once-off activity is being asked to do the work of what is supposed to be an ongoing strategy.
Take the three most common forms this kind of work usually takes.
An off-site is an event that ends on Friday and then has to compete with everything else that happens on Monday, which means that by the following week almost no one is making different decisions because of what happened in that room. A personality test is a snapshot that casts you as an ENTJ, a Red, or an Enneagram 3, but a label does not rehearse you for the next difficult conversation you need to have with a colleague in the break room once you have realised what type you are. An external speaker, in turn, is a performance that moves a room for an hour and then leaves the building with the person who delivered it, because inspiration without an internal owner to turn it into a recurring practice is really just a mood that eventually wore off.
The golden thread that runs through all three of these initiatives, and the many others that look like them, is that they are reactionary rather than relational, performative rather than productive, and isolated rather than integrated, which is why they so rarely produce any change that lasts beyond the week they happen in.
So if investing in our people isn’t any of the above, then what would the alternative even look like?
Shift one: from reactionary to a relational rhythm
If you trace most people and culture initiatives back to the moment they were kicked-off, you tend to find one of three triggers. A new personality framework is doing the rounds on LinkedIn. The CEO came back from a sabbatical with a bestseller and a new agenda. Or, more honestly than anyone wants to admit, the business has dipped a bit and someone feels the need to stage an intervention.
These are all reactionary. The intent is usually sincere, but the structure is hit-and-run, whereas the payoff from this work sits in the long term, not the short. They also tend to focus on an issue rather than the people: an engagement score, a dataset, a downward-trending quarter, some form of crisis.
Real people and culture work has to run the other way around. It has to be a rhythm: relational, ongoing, and owned by the team rather than performed at them.
Which brings me to the second shift.
Shift two: from performative to productive
Stand back from most people and culture work and ask what it is actually connected to. At the macro level, it is rarely connected to the business’s objectives. At the micro level, it is rarely connected to the specific skills and experiences the team needs to deliver on them. What it is connected to is usually whatever framework, author, or trendsetter is making waves this season.
That is what performative people and culture work looks like in practice. We did the assessment, we worked through the book, we hired the speaker, we did the course. The activity is real; the link to the business and the team is not.
Productive work is the opposite. It is custom, tailor-made, and fit for purpose for that specific team, that specific business, that specific outcome, that specific season.
When those things change, the strategy updates.
Shift three: from isolated to integrated
The third shift is to stop treating people and culture work as something you do in isolated pockets, and to start treating it as something integrated across two dimensions: context and application.
Integrated across context means the work runs at every level at which people exist in the business. At the individual level: the person, the leader, the new hire. At the communal level: team cohesion, the way a group works together. At the national and global level: the influence your business carries into the world it operates in.
Integrated across application means it is not quarantined to a department or an event, but woven into every aspect of how the business runs: every department, every action, every output, every objective.
When the work stays isolated, each piece carries the full weight on its own. When it integrates across both dimensions, the pieces reinforce each other, and the change begins to take shape.
Getting real: practice vs effect
It is easy to spin your wheels in people and culture work, which is why honesty about the change you are producing matters more than the activity itself.
The same effort, time, and money that goes into planning and running these initiatives has to go into following through, keeping the rhythm, integrating the work, and measuring what is actually shifting.
Doing the activity is a good start, but it is only half the work; the effect, sustained over time, is the whole point.
This is where The People Map comes in
The People Map assesses your current people and culture strategy and the effect it is producing, and then maps that picture against the CMAW framework that distinguishes work that is performing from work that is merely performative.
It works like this: you respond to a set of statements about your current people and culture work, and your answers are reworked to reveal two things, the practice you have in place and the effect it is producing. The two are then plotted together on a single visual diagram that shows, at a glance, where your work is performing and where it is only performative. It’s a 7-minute, free to use investment of your time that will yield positive results for years to come.
What the map shows you is not a verdict but a starting line.
You walk away with two or three specific wins to build on, two or three specific gaps that explain symptoms you are probably already familiar with, and one concrete next step corresponding to your lowest-scoring marker, framed as a healthy habit rather than another hit-and-run intervention.
Where to start
If you are reading this and recognising a few things, then that recognition is already part of the work — an honest read of where you stand is the first real step.
Experience The People Map and you will leave with a clear, specific picture of where your people and culture work is performing, and where it is showing up as merely a shadow of the work you and your team could be doing.
The assessment contains eighteen statements, takes about seven minutes to complete, and is free to use.
Once you have your report, share it with your team so that you can start a conversation where it will make the biggest difference.
And if you are willing, let me know in the comments too. I would love to hear your experience and what you’ve learned in the process.