We were sitting with the leadership team of a global company—smart people, big goals, good intentions. The head of people turned to us, half joking: “We’ve spent more time designing our new office floor plan than our culture.”

It landed like a punchline. But no one laughed.

Because it was true. They’d spent months debating snack bins and ping pong tables—but the one thing that touches every person, every day? Culture?

Still running on default settings.

Everyone could describe the vibe of the company, but no one could explain how culture actually shaped outcomes. Or how it showed up in hiring, promotions, or team decisions. Or who was accountable for any of it.

And that’s the thing: culture isn’t the brand. It’s the system.

It’s how power moves. How decisions get made. Who gets access—and who doesn’t.

If you’re not designing for it, it’s still working. Just not in your favor.

That’s why we created the Executive Talent & Culture Playbook—not to define culture, but to make it do something. Something consistent, equitable, and intentional.

Here’s what we’re seeing out there—and how the best leaders are changing the game.

1. “Our culture is great—as long as you already fit in.”

We were working with a media company that had a killer employer brand. Sharp content. Cool mission. Diverse hiring numbers.

And yet… people weren’t staying. Especially not people from underrepresented backgrounds. The exits were quiet, polite, and relentless.

We sat down with a group of mid-level employees. One woman said it clearly: “It’s not that the culture was bad. It just didn’t include me. I was adjacent to it. Watching it, not in it.”

That sentence stuck.

This company thought it had a retention problem. What it had was a belonging design problem. No one had ever defined what inclusion actually looked like inside their teams. It was implied—but never operationalized.

So we worked with their exec team to map how inclusion showed up (or didn’t) in some key moments:

• Hiring decisions

• Performance reviews

• Promotions & Succession

• Team leadership behaviors

We weren’t there to run another “inclusive leadership” workshop. We were there to help them design culture into the actual mechanics of leadership.

Culture isn’t how it feels on your best day. It’s how it works on your average day.

Because if you don’t design for inclusion, what you get is affinity bias, hierarchy loyalty, and a whole lot of “maybe next year” for the people you can’t afford to lose.

2. You’re not losing talent. You’re wearing them down.

One of our clients—a top-tier consulting firm—was hemorrhaging mid-level talent. Not the folks who flame out fast. The ones who stuck around, delivered results, and were this close to leadership.

They weren’t slamming doors on the way out. They were leaving quietly, after years of being told, “Not yet.” One Black manager told us: “I kept hitting goals, kept mentoring others, kept showing up. And I realized I wasn’t being evaluated—I was being tested.”

This wasn’t about performance. It was about credibility. Talent doesn’t leave because they’re tired. They leave because they’re tired of trying to prove they belong.

We helped the company overhaul how advancement decisions were made. That meant:

• Transparent promotion criteria

• Sponsorship—not just mentoring—for high-potential talent

• Performance reviews that measured leadership impact, not just output

And we made leadership responsible for tracking who they were sponsoring—and who they weren’t.

You don’t lose people all at once. You lose them in meetings, in feedback, in who gets the stretch job.

The point wasn’t to make everyone advance at the same pace. It was to stop rewarding sameness and punishing difference.

3. Your top talent isn’t watching your values. They’re watching your decisions.

At a healthcare company we work with, the CEO was all-in on inclusion. They had public commitments, solid recruiting numbers, and best-in-class policies.

But inside the company? The leadership pipeline looked a lot like it did five years ago.

We interviewed a group of rising leaders. One of them said: “I believe the company wants to be inclusive. But I also know who gets the late-night calls from the SVP when something big is going down. It’s not people like me.”

There it is.

Inclusion isn’t about what’s stated—it’s about who gets pulled in when it matters. Who gets consulted. Who gets trusted.

We worked with their exec team to implement what we call a Culture Operating System:

• What behaviors get rewarded?

• Whose voices get airtime in decisions?

• Are we distributing opportunity—or concentrating it?

This wasn’t a training. It was a leadership design sprint. We helped execs align on what inclusive leadership looks like when the pressure’s on—and how to model it consistently.

Your culture is not what you post. It’s what your best people see behind closed doors.

Because culture isn’t your mission statement. It’s who gets the callback.

So What’s in the Playbook?

We created the Executive Talent & Culture Playbook because leaders were telling us they believe in inclusion—but they didn’t know how to lead it.

The playbook gives them three things:

1. Culture Mapping – What’s your system actually producing? We audit how decisions get made, whose voices get heard, and where the real levers of power are.

2. Leadership Behavior Design – We work with your top leaders to define what inclusive leadership looks like in the business—and how to embed it into hiring, promotions, and feedback loops.

3. Accountability Infrastructure – No more measuring vibes. We help you build simple, usable systems to track inclusion in outcomes: who’s advancing, who’s stalling, and why.

It’s not about more programming. It’s about making culture part of how business gets done.

This isn’t just about DEI. It’s about whether your company is buildable—whether it can grow without replicating itself into irrelevance.

Here’s the pattern we keep seeing:

• Companies hire diverse talent into broken systems.

• Those systems weren’t built for them.

• Instead of fixing the system, the company doubles down on coaching the individual.

• The individual leaves. The cycle repeats.

The only way to break the loop? Change the system. Start with leadership. Make culture actionable.

Inclusion isn’t a side project. It’s the upgrade your leadership system needed anyway.