Your Culture Is Operating Your Business Whether You Designed It or Not

Every company has a culture.

The question is whether you built yours intentionally or allowed thousands of small decisions to build it for you.

I've been thinking about that since Keyser was recently recognized with eight 2026 Top Workplaces Culture Excellence Awards: Innovation, Employee Appreciation, Work-Life Flexibility, Employee Well-Being, Professional Development, Compensation & Benefits, Leadership, and Purpose & Values. We were also recognized as a Top Workplace in the Real Estate Industry.

I'm grateful for each one, especially because the recognition is based on feedback from our people.

But the breadth of the categories is what caught my attention.

Innovation and employee well-being don't immediately appear connected. Neither do compensation and purpose. Yet inside an organization, they absolutely are.

They are all outputs of the system leaders create.

Over the years, my leadership team and I have tried to make a few deliberate choices at Keyser.

We made disagreement part of innovation.

One of our values is Disruptive Mindset. But you can't ask people to disrupt an industry while training them not to disrupt your own thinking. People need permission to question processes, assumptions - and leadership. The executive's job isn't to have every good idea. It's to build an organization where good ideas can survive regardless of who has them.

We made appreciation about behavior, not just results.

Results matter. But if you only celebrate the outcome, people quickly learn that how they achieved it is secondary. We try to recognize the behaviors we want multiplied: selfless service, collaboration, urgency and people helping others succeed.

We treat flexibility and well-being as questions of organizational capacity.

I've come to believe leaders should pay attention not only to whether the work gets done, but whether the way it gets done is sustainable. Flexibility requires trust. Well-being requires awareness. Neither requires lowering the bar.

We try to develop people before we need them.

Every one of our people and process managers has been developed internally and promoted into leadership. That matters because succession shouldn't begin when a position opens. By then, you're late.

We view compensation and benefits as part of the value exchange.

Leaders spend enormous energy thinking about the value employees create for the business. We should be equally thoughtful about the value the business creates for them. Compensation is part of that equation, but so are opportunity, autonomy, development, flexibility and meaningful work.

We build leadership at every level.

Our Core Operating Principles emphasize accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement and respect. The goal isn't to create more followers of leadership. It's to create more people capable of leading. When people understand the principles behind how an organization operates, they can make strong decisions without waiting for someone with a bigger title to tell them what to do.

And underneath all of it is purpose.

Our values include Excellence Everywhere, Unreasonable Service, Relentless Work Ethic, Disruptive Mindset, Selfless Leadership and Always Coachable.

Those values create an important constraint on leadership: we are accountable to them too.

That's where I think culture becomes strategically interesting.

Most executives already know how to lead people. The bigger opportunity is to build an organization that increasingly requires less direct leadership from you because people understand how decisions should be made.

When values determine what gets rewarded, how disagreement works, who gets promoted, where resources go and what behavior isn't tolerated, culture begins carrying some of the load leadership used to carry.

That's organizational leverage.

Years ago, I wrote You Don't Have to Be Ruthless to Win around a belief that seemed counterintuitive to many people at the time: selfless service and high performance can reinforce one another.

I'm grateful that our people continue to help us prove, challenge and improve that idea.

These awards aren't evidence that we've perfected culture. We haven't. But they are encouraging evidence that when you intentionally design how people experience an organization, you can also influence how that organization performs.

For fellow leaders, that may be the most worthwhile question to ask: What is your culture teaching people to do when you aren't in the room?

That's the work we'll keep doing at Keyser. If you'd like to learn more about the principles and practices behind our culture, visit Keyser.com/culture.