Your organization’s culture is like a six-pack. It’s hard to get, and even harder to keep.
Everyone wants culture. Most companies have posters about it, Slack emojis, and a “people-first” deck. But instead of culture being an announcement, it is a daily practice of how people are treated and empowered, especially when deadlines stack, budgets shrink, and the client’s “quick edit” turns into a rewrite.
Companies today talk a great deal about how their brand is shaping culture, but here’s the lesson: You can’t transform culture externally if you don’t have one internally. You can’t export what you haven’t built.
One of the fastest ways to understand your internal culture is to stop listening to what people say and start watching what leadership allows. If disrespect is tolerated because “they’re a rainmaker,” that’s your culture. If burnout is tolerated because “that’s the business,” that’s your culture. It matters because toxicity spreads faster than joy. Joy takes intention. Toxicity takes oxygen.
WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR?
So if you’re an executive leader thinking, “We should do more—more community impact, more purpose,” I’m with you. Start by asking, “What do we want to stand for?” followed by “Do our people feel what we say we stand for?”
Values are what you do and what you repeat. If your values don’t show up in calendars, budgets, hiring, and feedback, they won’t translate into culture—they’re just decorations.
Stop letting the urgent overwhelm the important. Trust is built when values line up with priorities. Urgency will gladly consume leadership energy and leave nothing for coaching, recognition, or development. One of my strongest convictions is simple: Build a relationship with your employees that goes beyond a to-do list. People don’t commit to tasks, they commit to leaders, teams, and missions they trust. Leaders inspire more than they ask. A culture that isn’t intentionally people-first accidentally becomes stress and burnout.
But culture tends to break in two familiar directions: cheap grace and weaponized truth. Cheap grace says, “Be nice,” and avoid hard conversations. Weaponized truth says “Just say it,” and mistakes bluntness for leadership. Neither builds a healthy culture. Both create fear, just with different fonts.
A strong culture can tell the truth and keep dignity intact. It can hold standards and still hold people. That is true in advertising as it is in all organizations because people are the product. Their creativity, instincts, taste, and courage drive outcomes. When we reduce culture to vibes, we end up with teams that play it safe. And safe work rarely changes anything.
IT’S OKAY TO STAND OUT
This leads to another leadership trap: sanding down your people so they don’t stand out. Don’t dumb yourself down or your employees, to blend in. Don’t settle for the status quo. In our industry, sameness isn’t stability; it’s slow decline. If you’re not growing the business, you’re dying. The goal is also to grow people.
If you want a practical way to tune culture without writing a 40-page manifesto, start with these questions.
- What should be expected?
- What should be rewarded?
- What should be corrected?
That’s it. That is the system.
When expectations are vague, people guess. When rewards are inconsistent, people perform for politics. When correction never happens, standards collapse. Commitment grows when people know what success looks like, and believe growth is real.
TRANSFORM CULTURE EXTERNALLY
Now, about transforming culture externally: It only works when it’s overflow, not optics.
For example, our approach as an agency is to cause “disruption for good.” That purpose took tangible shape through a nonprofit we founded, For The Greater Hood, that transforms vacant storefronts into luxury pop-up boutiques where families facing hardship can shop for free with dignity, care, and choice. To date, we’ve served more than 17,000 people and distributed over $2.5 million in new clothing.
We’ve also used our creative skills in moments like Stop The Silence; in 2020, Chicago: America’s Hidden War; and Give A Sip, showing that generosity is woven into our culture. Give your time and give what you have, consistently enough that it becomes who you are.
But here’s the bottom line: External impact is not a substitute for culture, and none of it is sustainable without organizational health.
Want to shift culture—inside and out? Start with what nobody sees: how you give feedback when someone misses the mark, how you share credit when things go right, how you protect people when pressure rises, how you refuse to normalize disrespect, and how you keep showing up after the hype is gone. Consistency creates change.
If you lead a business, you already know you have influence. You shape brands. But the most underrated place you can reshape culture is the place you lead every day.
Start inside your four walls. Build something. Protect it. Correct what erodes it. Reward what strengthens it. Then take it outward, not as performance but as transformation.
In my experience, reshaping culture moves through four stages: awareness, acknowledgement, accountability, and action.
And remember: Culture is like a six-pack. It’s hard to get and hard to keep. But when you train daily, it becomes strength you can share—for your business, for your people, and for the world beyond your wall.
Eric Rojas is founder and chief creative officer of Six+One.
