Tracking What Really Matters
The CFO's question was direct and fair: "How do we know if this culture stuff is actually working?"
I was sitting in a conference room with the leadership team of a growing technology company, six months into their culture-first transformation. The business results were promising in that efficiency was up, turnover was down, and customer satisfaction was improving. But the CFO needed concrete evidence that their investment in culture development was driving these outcomes, not just correlation.
His skepticism wasn't unusual. Culture feels intangible compared to revenue growth or profit margins. You can't point to a relationship and say it generated $50,000 in quarterly revenue the way you can point to a sales campaign. But culture's impact on business results is real and measurable if you know what to look for.
The breakthrough came when we stopped thinking about culture as something separate from business performance and started tracking it the same way we track any other critical business system. Just as their operating system included scorecards for financial and operational metrics, they needed systematic ways to monitor cultural health.
The Early Warning System
We started with what I call leading indicators or those cultural behaviors that predict business outcomes. In their weekly leadership meetings, they began tracking simple but revealing metrics. How often did people proactively share problems rather than waiting for them to surface in reports? How quickly were conflicts resolved when they arose? How frequently did team members ask for help when they were struggling? None of the metrics were precise, they were derived indicators whose vectors of change showed a direction in the measurement.
It sounded a bit silly. These behaviors might seem soft, but they predicted hard outcomes. Teams that shared problems early consistently outperformed teams that didn't. Departments with faster conflict resolution had higher innovation rates. People who felt safe asking for help when struggling rarely missed their commitments.
They also tracked purpose connection - not through surveys, but through conversation quality. Could people articulate how their individual work connected to company mission? Did they talk about company goals with enthusiasm or resignation? Were they making decisions based on values rather than just procedures?
The gift utilization metrics proved especially revealing. They tracked what percentage of time people spent in their strength zones, how often departments collaborated naturally, and how many innovative ideas emerged from individuals who felt energized by their work. While hese numbers were imprecise, they correlated strongly with both individual performance and collective results.
The Culture Pulse
They implemented what they called a weekly culture pulse which was composed of three simple questions that took less than two minutes to answer but provided real-time insights into cultural health. The questions were deceptively simple: (1) How energized do you feel about your work this week? (2) How well are your gifts being utilized? (3) How connected do you feel to team members? But the accumulated patterns in responses revealed cultural trends before they showed up in business metrics.
When energy scores dropped, they knew to look for purpose disconnection or overwork in non-strength areas. When gift utilization scores declined, they knew to examine whether people were being assigned work that didn't match their natural abilities. When connection scores weakened, they knew to invest more intentionally in relationship building.
Making Measurement Meaningful
The key to successful culture measurement is useful data that guides decisions and demonstrates progress. They shared culture metrics transparently with the team, celebrated culture wins alongside business wins, and used the information to guide their ongoing development efforts.
A year into their measurement journey, the CFO had become one of the strongest culture advocates on the team. "I can see the direct line from culture health to business results," he said. "When our people are more engaged and aligned, everything else improves. And now we can track it, manage it, and invest in it strategically."
You can’t reduce culture to numbers but you can recognize that culture's impact on business success is real, measurable, and manageable. When you can track culture development with the same rigor you track financial performance, you create accountability for the human foundation that drives sustainable excellence.
Want to track culture like you track results? Discover practical tools and insights in Supercharge: A New Playbook for Leadership. Start measuring what truly matters today.
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