A few years ago I sat down with a business owner who walked me around his office, introducing every person we passed the exact same way: “This is our team member in charge of HR. This is our team member in charge of sales. This is our team member in charge of finances.” He said it with real pride, like the word itself was doing some work. Once we got back to his office, I asked him one question: could you define team for me? He couldn’t. I told him what I still tell owners today: if you can’t define it, the people you just introduced me to can’t either, and calling everyone a team member doesn’t make a team. He never signed an agreement with me. But I think about that conversation every time I see research on the gap between how confident leaders are in their own culture and how little of that confidence survives contact with the people actually living inside it. DHR Global’s 2026 Workforce Trends Report (opens in new tab), based on a survey of 1,500 corporate professionals across North America, Europe, and Asia, found that 77% of C-suite leaders call their company’s culture “very important.” Only 37% of entry-level employees say the same, and executives were 2.5 times more likely than entry-level staff to describe their own culture as well-defined. Two groups looking at the same business, answering the same question two different ways.
Widen the lens past the executive suite and the gap doesn’t close. It just shows up differently. DHR’s researchers found that 93% of the workers they surveyed agreed culture matters to their experience at work, somewhat or very. But only 36% said their company’s culture is well-defined and drives performance. Nearly half, 46%, called it reactive and inconsistent from team to team, and another 15% said it was vague, something nobody had actively shaped at all. That’s a lot more than a mild disagreement about degree: it’s most of a company’s own workforce saying the culture leadership feels good about doesn’t exist in any form they can point to.
Could you define team for me?
— Gary Henson, Founder of Gary Henson Group
None of this makes leaders dishonest. Most of them believe exactly what they’re telling a researcher. What they’re describing is an intention, and an intention only becomes a culture once it gets written down, communicated the same way more than once, and lived out consistently enough that employees stop having to guess at it. SHRM’s own research on leadership perception gaps (opens in new tab) points at exactly this mechanism. “Leaders often judge themselves based on intention, while teams experience behavior in real time,” says Maria Brown, head of research and education at MRG Assessments, in that same research. A leader can be completely sincere about wanting a strong culture and still be the reason it isn’t one, because sincerity was never the part that was missing.
Here’s the part most owners skip past: nobody hands a business its culture already built. Left undefined, one forms anyway, out of whatever moods, habits, and inconsistencies the person running things brings to work each day. An owner who’s never written down what the business stands for hasn’t avoided building a culture. He’s built one by accident, and that accidental version, not the one he’d describe if you asked him directly, is what’s showing up in the DHR gap. Call it less a communication problem than a listening one: the only person who’s ever heard the culture described out loud is the one running the place.
of C-suite leaders say their company culture is "very important," compared with just 37% of entry-level employees who say the same. DHR Global, "Workforce Trends Report 2026" →
Closing that gap doesn’t start with a new values poster or a mission statement nobody asked for. It starts with the same question I asked that prospect years ago, aimed at your own senior team instead of an outsider: could you define this the same way I would? Pick whichever word matters most in your business right now—team, accountability, commitment—and ask three people on your leadership team to define it separately, in writing, with no chance to compare notes first. If you get three different answers, or three blank stares, you’ve found your actual starting point.
From there the fix is mechanical: write down what the business actually stands for as a real vision, mission, and set of company commitments employees will remember. Make expectations explicit, in writing and out loud, more than once. Hold regular meetings where that language gets used until it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like how the place actually runs. GH Group’s Inside-Out Method™ starts in exactly this spot, because a culture built by accident and a culture built on purpose can look identical from the owner’s desk. The only place you can tell them apart is out on the floor, which is exactly where DHR’s 37% is standing.
