If It’s Not Measured, It’s Not Culture

Last week, I wrote about why onboarding doesn’t fail because of design—it fails because leaders don’t show up. The response to that article was thoughtful and, in many cases, deeply personal. Many people shared variations of the same experience: organisations say that people matter, but that belief rarely shows up in how the business actually operates.

That tension has stayed with me. Over the past week, I have been reflecting on why this gap between intention and reality persists, and more importantly, what it actually takes to close it. I have come to a simple, but uncomfortable conclusion: culture does not change until it is measured, shared, and owned by everyone.

This is not a new idea for me. Years ago, during my time at Google, I had a conversation with Joris Merks-Benjaminsen about what it really takes to move the needle in sales enablement. We discussed many of the usual levers, training, content, and strategy, but kept coming back to one underlying driver: incentives.

Incentives shape behaviour, and over time, behaviour shapes culture. At the time, this felt intuitive. What I have learned since is that incentives only work when they are visible, consistently measured, and collectively owned. Without that, they remain ideas, well understood, widely agreed with, and quietly ignored.

I learned this more directly in a later role, where I was responsible for engagement and development. At the time, engagement challenges were closely tied to career growth and capability, so I focused on building something meaningful: a system, not a set of disconnected initiatives. This included career pathways, competency frameworks, hiring and promotion processes, coaching tools, and an end-to-end employee experience grounded in development.

The intention was clear. The system was designed to support people while also improving performance. I reported on this work regularly in our quarterly business reviews, expecting discussion, challenge, or at the very least, engagement.

None came. Crickets.

Assuming the issue was how I was communicating the value, I changed approach. I worked with analysts to build a scalable way to measure the return on investment of learning. With the support of AI, we were able to quantify impact in commercial terms. In one case, just three hours of training was linked to nearly €300,000 in return. This was the language of the business and reflected the same level of rigour applied to revenue, growth, and efficiency.

Still, there was no meaningful response. Just crickets.

With some distance, the issue became clear. It was not the quality of the work or the strength of the data. It was ownership. I was the only person accountable for those outcomes. Because no one else was measured on engagement, development, or capability, those metrics did not carry weight in the room. They were not actively dismissed; they were simply not relevant to anyone else’s performance.

There is, however, another layer to this that is often overlooked. Even the best systems do not drive change on their own. I had built what many organisations say they want: clear pathways, defined capabilities, structured development, and measurable impact. The system was there.

What was missing was the culture to carry it.

Systems do not execute themselves; people do. And people prioritise what they are measured on, what they are held accountable for, and what is consistently reinforced by leadership. Without that, even the strongest system becomes optional. Optional systems do not change behaviour.

This is where organisations get culture wrong. They treat it as something that can be owned by a function. Engagement sits with HR, development sits with Learning and Development, and culture is assumed to sit somewhere in between. In reality, culture does not sit in a team. It sits in what the organisation pays attention to and what it expects leaders to deliver.

In every organisation I have worked in—including Google—there is absolute clarity on what matters, because it shows up in the numbers. Revenue is measured, growth is measured, and efficiency is measured. These metrics are reviewed in every QBR, challenged when they fall short, and acted upon because they are shared and owned across the business.

That is why they drive behaviour.

People often say that organisations are defined by what they do. In practice, it is more accurate to say that organisations are defined by what they measure. Measurement directs attention, attention drives behaviour, and behaviour, when repeated consistently, becomes culture.

If we accept that, the implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable. If engagement, development, and capability are not measured alongside business performance—if they are not discussed in QBRs, if leaders are not accountable for them—then they are not shaping culture. They are sitting adjacent to it. No system, no matter how well designed, can compensate for that gap.

The organisations that genuinely care about people look different. Not in what they say, but in what they measure. Leaders at every level carry accountability for people outcomes. Engagement is not treated as an HR metric, but as a leadership metric. Development is not positioned as a programme, but as an expectation. Skills are not assumed; they are tracked, discussed, and acted upon.

Crucially, these metrics show up in the same forums as revenue and growth. That is what makes them real.

If there is one lesson I have taken from experience, it is this: culture is not built through intention; it is built through accountability. If people metrics are not shared, they will not be owned. If they are not owned, they will not be prioritised. And if they are not prioritised, they will not change behaviour.

So when organisations say that people are their greatest asset, I find myself asking a different question: where does that show up in your numbers?

Because if it does not show up in your QBR, if it is not tied to leadership performance, and if nothing happens when those metrics are missed, then it is not part of your culture.

It is part of your narrative. And narratives do not execute systems.

People do.