Why culture doesn’t fail in values decks—but in how transformation teams are built.
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Culture atrophy – the gradual weakening of an organization’s shared values and norms that once defined how work gets done - is a growing concern for CHROs, as economic volatility, AI adoption, and ongoing reorganizations create an environment of sustained complexity and overlapping change.
The financial cost of cultural decline is very real. SHRM notes that turnover due to poor workplace culture costs U.S. organizations an estimated $223 billion over a five-year period.
While most culture strategies focus on values articulation, leadership development, and engagement diagnostics—which have utility—they often leave how culture shows up in day-to-day work largely implicit.
There is, however, a lever that shapes culture long before surveys are administered or training launches: the way cross-functional transformation teams are designed and operate.
In my work as an executive coach and organizational effectiveness consultant I have noticed a pattern: the earliest signals of whether a transformation will succeed — and whether it will meaningfully shift culture — appear well before kickoff. They show up in how the transformation team is assembled, how authority is distributed, and how tradeoffs are navigated in the absence of perfect information.
Transformation teams function as high-visibility operating systems. Employees observe them closely, not because they are formally tasked with culture change but because they reveal how the organization behaves when priorities collide and how leaders make decisions. And when a recent Gallup studied revealed that only 23% of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization, the stakes are high.
People notice:
These observations shape employees’ expectations faster and often more durably than formal culture initiatives. In this sense, transformation teams are not culture-neutral delivery mechanisms — they are culture in motion.
When teams are assembled quickly with partial capacity, unclear decision authority, and inherited power dynamics, they tend to reinforce existing patterns. That signal is rarely aligned with the cultural values leaders say they want to strengthen.
This dynamic creates a strategic opportunity for HR to shape the transformation team’s operating conditions as a lever to address cultural atrophy and advance cultural-related goals.
Designing transformation teams intentionally is one of the few opportunities to embed desired behaviors directly into the most visible work. When done well, it aligns execution with culture rather than treating them as parallel efforts.
Culture is then no longer something leaders ask employees to adopt; it becomes something employees experience through how change unfolds.
And there are financial implications of getting this right. Gartner shared that organizations that successfully embed their desired culture into employees' daily work can see up to a 34% increase in employee performance.
Organizations that use transformation teams as a cultural lever tend to be explicit about several design choices:
Explicit Decision Architecture
Decision rights are clarified upfront. Governance is calibrated to balance speed with accountability, reducing friction caused by ambiguity and informal power dynamics.
Skills, Not Just Roles
Teams are built around the skills required to achieve outcomes, not simply functional representation. Skill gaps are surfaced early and addressed deliberately rather than absorbed through overextension.
Contextual Structure
Team structure is treated as a strategic choice. Leaders remain intentionally connected to the work, recognizing that structure itself signals priorities and accountability.
Deliberate Ways of Working
Teams design for volatility rather than assuming stability. Tradeoffs are made visible, and early risk escalation is normalized.
Measures That Reflect Impact
Progress is assessed through more than milestones. Readiness, trust signals, and capacity are monitored to identify risk before it manifests as missed outcomes.
Tools That Enable Discernment
Tools are selected to reduce friction and cognitive load, supporting clarity and shared understanding rather than adding complexity.
Individually, none of these choices are novel. Collectively, they determine whether a transformation reinforces existing cultural norms or demonstrates a different way of operating that can reduce cost and increase high performance.
Leaders often ask whether they have the right people on a transformation team. A more revealing question is whether the team has been designed to model the culture and operating norms the organization is trying to sustain.
In most cases, poor design is not intentional. Teams are formed quickly, authority remains ambiguous, and cultural impact is treated as secondary to delivery. Yet employees begin interpreting signals immediately.
Long before outcomes appear on dashboards, people have already learned what the organization prioritizes when change is hard.
When transformation teams are designed with intention, they do more than deliver results. They provide credible evidence that the organization can navigate complexity differently — and live its values when it matters most.
Your transformation team is shaping culture right now.
The only question is whether it was designed to do so deliberately.
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