Why Culture Follows Structure

The reporting channel existed. The consequence of using it was uncertain.

Boeing had formal channels through which employees could report safety concerns. Yet an FAA expert panel found some employees hesitant to report when a manager controlling pay, promotion or discipline could investigate the report.

Wells Fargo's independent directors likewise connected sales misconduct to goals, pressure and decentralized oversight. The company responded by removing retail sales goals and changing incentives and oversight.

What does your company's arrangement teach people to do?

You can't fix with values what the structure keeps rewarding.

I distinguish three things: what leadership says; what the operating arrangement rewards, permits or obstructs; and what people learn to repeat. They can reinforce one another. They can also contradict one another.

I examine the experience of deciding, speaking up, keeping commitments and protecting customers—and what that experience teaches. Individual wrongdoing remains wrong; leadership must also examine whether its rules and rewards make the same misconduct more likely to recur.

1. The Behavior Loop

Consider a company asking people to take ownership while requiring multiple approvals for an ordinary exception, discouraging bad news and rewarding emergency rescues.

The speech and the experience teach different lessons. The Behavior Loop separates them.

Test experiences across people and roles. When behavior changes with the rule, a structural explanation gains support.

In my Business Structural Drag framework, Structural Drag is work a company repeats because of how it is arranged—work a different arrangement could remove without changing what the customer receives or what the business must protect.

Approval routes shape waiting and decision rights; reporting routes shape whether concerns reach independent investigators. Safety and compliance protections remain necessary.

The loop identifies where to look: not only at what employees say they believe, but at the moment the organization responds to what they do. A values statement may praise decisive action; a management review may penalize every decision that bypasses a senior approval. Those experiences have consequences long after the workshop ends.

My first management test is not a survey asking whether people feel empowered. It is a work sample showing what happened when someone tried to act.

2. Six Structural Drag profiles—and the behaviors they could teach

The six profiles become hypotheses about behavior an arrangement could teach, not diagnoses or personality labels.

Heroics aren't a culture. They're a symptom.

A founder may demand initiative yet retain every approval. A site leader may be urged to collaborate while being rewarded only for local results. A trusted specialist may be praised for saving the day while no one is taught to take over. A $30 million company does not need a scandal to recognize these patterns. It needs to look at what happens when capable people try to act.

The profiles predict different mechanisms. The test is which repeated work the arrangement makes necessary.

Within Renergy™, my management framework for usable operating capacity, work can feel additive (leaving usable energy), dilutive (drawing reserves down) or punitive (dreaded, system-fighting work that can feel as if one hour consumes several hours of energy and extends recovery). When punitive work recurs, the test is whether the arrangement can change without weakening protections.

These are different from complaints about attitude. A delay can be timed. An escalation can be followed from request to decision. A handoff can be checked for what the receiving team actually received. The work makes the hypothesis testable.

3. Competing explanations before blaming structure

The same behavior can have different causes.

The response may require accountability, better information, independent reporting, different incentives, changed approvals—or no change. Preserve necessary safeguards.

4. Four public-company situations

Three independent investigations identify operating mechanisms. Adobe reports a changed rule and subsequent experience. The findings are theirs; my structural questions are mine. No named company is assigned a Structural Drag profile.

5. What the four situations establish

Wells Fargo connects behavior to incentives and oversight; Boeing to reporting authority; GM to accountability and information gaps. Adobe reports a deliberate process change and subsequent experience.

The pattern to investigate is what happened when someone acted on a declared value. Was the concern heard? Was the decision reversed? Did the manager receive authority or merely responsibility?

Culture is the label used after those experiences repeat.

6. The economics of culture

I will not label a regulatory penalty, employee complaint or survey result the “cost of culture.” Those measures have different causes and evidentiary limits.

My three ledgers remain distinct: verified financial effects; paid capacity consumed by documented waiting, rework, workarounds and escalations; and contribution not earned, which requires evidence that released capacity could produce useful output. Do not count the same effect twice.

A fourth category is risk exposure: safety, regulatory, legal, customer and reputational harm. It deserves its own controls, risk assessment and legal treatment. An uncertain risk is not a booked cash expense, and a fine is not proof that organizational redesign would have prevented the event.

The financial test is: Which repeated paid activities and risks trace to an operating arrangement, and what would change if that arrangement changed?

7. Give this to your CEO, COO and head of people

The Behavior Trace

Choose one observable behavior leadership complains about: slow decisions, unnecessary escalations, private workarounds, silence when problems emerge, blame between functions or repeated heroics. Do not begin with an abstract claim that employees lack accountability.

1. What behavior, exactly, and where does it appear? Select a workstream, site or role. Identify actual decisions or events and the dates they occurred. Distinguish a repeated pattern from an isolated episode or an employee's account of how things feel.

2. What happens to someone who does the opposite? Find cases in which someone decided independently, escalated a concern early, challenged the forecast, refused incomplete work or asked for clarification. Was the response supportive, delayed, dismissive, punitive or simply unclear?

3. Who decides, who is rewarded and who carries the risk? Map authority and consequences across employees, managers, functional leaders and control roles. Check who can approve, veto, investigate, change pay or review performance. Identify where duties require independent oversight.

4. Which arrangement could make the behavior rational? Name the specific approval rule, incentive, reporting relationship, readiness standard, performance measure or information boundary. A proposed mechanism should predict what happens in a comparable case; vague labels such as “politics” are not enough.

5. What else could explain the behavior? Test individual conduct, hiring and capability; leader behavior; external pressure; legal obligations; genuine uncertainty; and measurement bias. What evidence would disprove the arrangement hypothesis?

6. What would a better arrangement require—and what must it protect? Specify the alternative. It may change approval authority, performance incentives, information access, handoff rules or independent escalation. Protect safety, employee rights, customer obligations, technical review and necessary segregation of duties. Estimate the cost of transition and unintended consequences.

7. What is the decision and what will prove it worked? Change the arrangement, change incentives, change decision rights, address individual conduct, combine actions or deliberately change nothing. Assign ownership and a review date. Measure the behavior and its consequences before and after—not just attendance at values training or a new survey score.

The test can confirm the rule, require individual accountability, disprove the hypothesis—or show that management rewards the behavior it condemns.

The purpose is not to judge people. It is to find out what the company has taught them.

8. What would change my conclusion?

I would weaken an arrangement explanation if the reported behavior is isolated to a particular individual's choices while comparable colleagues under the same authority act differently; if a legitimate safety or regulatory obligation fully explains the steps; or if external pressure explains the timing and the behavior disappears when that pressure passes.

If a verified rule change leaves behavior unchanged, the mechanism needs reexamination.

I would strengthen the explanation if comparable employees in the same arrangement repeatedly make the same choice, if acting otherwise predictably triggers avoidable delay or adverse consequences, or if a carefully implemented rule change changes behavior without weakening service or protections.

The trace must end in observed work.

9. Before the next culture initiative

People return from culture workshops to the same approvals, supervisors, incentives and promises. Those conditions still teach.

Your people aren't resisting change. They're following the rules you actually run.

Where an arrangement teaches the behavior, the response must reach the arrangement.

Research 01 explains the six Structural Drag profiles. Research 06 identifies four signatures of arrangement-created work. This paper asks what repeated work and consequences teach people to do, including when leadership says something different.

Before the next culture campaign, run the Behavior Trace on one recurring behavior. Then change the responsible mechanism—or deliberately change nothing.

You can't fix with values what the structure keeps rewarding.

Gower Idrees

Creator of the Business Structural Drag framework and the Renergy™ management framework

Sources, Evidence Notes & Research Methodology

Evidence reviewed through November 3, 2026. These are historical findings, not statements about current culture or Structural Drag at the named companies.