This is the third post in this spring’s company-culture series, in which we hear from culture consultant Joshua Pearson, who understands its life-saving value.
April 23, 2025
By Rachel Smith
Joshua Pearson has a saying—“Strategy gets you into battle; culture gets you home.” For the executives and operations teams Joshua works with, this is an apt metaphor on the important role culture plays. Originally wasn’t a metaphor at all. Joshua worked nearly seven years as an Army contractor. He spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan delivering services and equipment in high-risk, wartime environments. He learned firsthand the critical role that culture plays on the front line.
While Joshua doesn’t always lead with the fact that he worked alongside several different branches of the military including special-forces teams, I’m doing it purposefully. I’m hoping it will prevent some of the disdainful responses that invariably happen whenever the word “culture” is mentioned. “When I drop the “C word,” says Joshua, “I get eye rolls and misunderstandings. Understandably so, there are a lot of egos and pride behind leadership, and we have to walk a careful line to make sure we get the message across without making it feel like we’re judging them.”
The eye rolls clearly bother me more than they do Joshua. I sat down with him this week to hear his take on the role of culture within organizations. How does he define it? What are some critical elements? Where can companies begin to make changes? He was able to make culture much more tangible and provided some great examples of both the good and the bad.
How does Joshua define culture?
How did you say it in your last blog? How we do things around here? Seth Godin has famously said, ‘People like us do things like this.’ I think that’s good, but it doesn’t really give you a landing place on where to go. What is the thing that I need to be doing, right? I think it’s really good to kind of break apart the pieces that aren’t culture. The best way to define something is sometimes to define what it isn’t.
Culture is not strategy. Culture is not frameworks. For many years, it was really tech leading the charge in focusing on culture. And for a lot of companies, that looked like ping-pong tables, unlimited PTO, and things like that. That’s not culture either. Those are perhaps artifacts of a good culture. It’s good that people are getting together and doing things, but you can have a ping-pong table and still have a toxic culture. You can have unlimited PTO that you can never use, right?
I think a ‘leadership operating system’ is the best way to frame it…the operating system on a computer gives you this graphical interface or command line interface that you can use. You type some stuff, you move your mouse, you click on something, or you enter a command. It goes back to the compiler. That compiler converts it into machine-readable language, you know, binary code. And then the machine processes, it comes back through the compiler, and you get an output on your screen. That’s exactly what we need to be thinking about—communication at different levels through the organization.
Besides communication, Joshua says that company culture hinges on the psychological safety of the team. We’ve written about psychological safety before. Like culture, it is often misunderstood and prompts an eye roll. Joshua does a good job of simplifying it.
There are four components of psychological safety—inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety, and challenger safety. The initial one is, regardless of your background, regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of all these other factors, you should be included. You have to create a safe environment for everybody to communicate in.
Once that’s established, you need learner safety, which means I’m free to make mistakes and I’m able to be coached…you have to celebrate and recognize failures—not chastise people for them—and use them as teachable moments. And let people take ownership of that and solve that problem and give them credit for it.
Once you establish that, then it’s contributor safety, which means, if I’m in this meeting that I need to be in, everybody should have something to say. There’s a tendency in corporations: they tend to lump a lot of people into big meetings, and that starts to break down because what happens is, it stratifies. You get groupthink, and people are less likely to have the opportunity to say something or the willingness to say something.
Joshua recommends meetings of eight to ten people.
The last piece is challenger safety, which means we’re going to get rid of egos in the organization. It doesn’t matter what your title is. If you see something, say something.
Joshua goes on to explain that in safety-oriented environments like manufacturing plants or oil and gas, this is typical. Employees have stop-work authority, but that’s typically where challenger safety ends. When people bring up new and different ideas and they continually get shot down, they stop bringing up new ideas, and the organization suffers.
Last week, we reviewed much of the research that quantified the importance of company culture on employees, customers, and a company’s bottom line. Joshua added another study to this list. Over the course of 22 years, Dr. Kamal Birdi, along with several other professors, tracked 308 companies that had implemented different kinds of operations-improvement initiatives—Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, just-in-time inventory control, etc. The results? There was almost no correlation between deploying these strategies and any recognized, long-term enterprise value. What did make a valuable difference? Shifts in company culture—specifically, decentralizing decision-making within the company.
Joshua explains that directors, vice presidents, and C-suite executives are busy with paperwork, financial reporting, and meetings. While executives may issue orders that affect everyone downstream, they don’t have time to manage those 5,000 people who are impacted. It makes sense for them to decentralize their decision-making to the team level. This way, whoever has the expertise in that area gets to make the call.
Decentralization tends to break up the rigidity and failure points in a system. If a failure happens, it’s everybody’s responsibility…Wins you should celebrate, but on an individual level. This also gives a signal to people who may not feel comfortable speaking up or trying to make a change, but they see someone else get recognized for something, and they’re like, ‘I want that.’ Then they start to want to contribute. And if you’re not getting beat down on failures at an individual level, so if everybody takes the failures, and then those wins get celebrated, you’ll start to see people trying to map their behavior over to that.
Joshua Pearson is used to eye rolls and resistance from teams. Right now, he and his team are working with a Fortune 500 company’s engineering division.
They said, ‘Hey, look, you don’t have any engineering experience, you know? So, really, you have no value to add to us.’ And we said, ‘Well, you’re one of the greatest engineering organizations in the world. If it was an engineering problem, we think you would have figured it out by now.’ That was the initial, like, aha moment for them.
In the last five months, Joshua’s team has created 10- to 12-million dollars in value for the organization. So quit it with the damn eye rolls already!
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