How to Build a Better Company Culture

By Malcolm Gurley, President

Gurley Leadership Solutions Inc.  |  Ajax, Ontario

Every leader I have worked with across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area wants a better company culture. The challenge is that most of them are not sure where to start. Culture is one of those words that gets used a lot and defined very little. I have seen organizations spend thousands of dollars on team events, values workshops, and culture committees, and still end up with the same disengagement, turnover, and low morale they started with.

The reason those efforts fail is almost always the same. They treat culture as a program when it is actually a pattern. It is the pattern of how your leaders behave every single day, especially under pressure.

Why Is Company Culture So Hard to Change?

The data on company culture in Canada is sobering. McLean and Company's 2025 Employee Engagement Trends Report, based on survey responses from over 216,000 employees across 236 organizations, found that while 62.6% of employees are categorized as engaged, employees who receive meaningful feedback from their managers are 5.7 times more likely to feel supported in their career development. That gap between organizations that develop their leaders and those that do not is widening every year.

Culture is hard to change because most organizations try to change it at the wrong level. They work on values statements, engagement surveys, and team events while leaving the actual day-to-day behaviour of their managers unchanged. The managers are the culture. Whatever they do consistently is what the culture becomes, regardless of what the posters on the wall say.

What Does a Strong Company Culture Actually Look Like?

Strong company culture is not about ping-pong tables or Friday socials. It is about what people experience in their work every day. In the organizations I work with across Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Pickering, and the broader GTA, the ones with genuinely strong cultures share the same characteristics:

• Leaders who set clear, written goals and revisit them consistently with their teams
• Communication that is honest, timely, and goes in both directions
• Delegation that stretches people and builds their capability over time
• Genuine recognition of contribution, not just performance review once a year
• A visible path for growth that shows people they have a future inside the organization
• Leaders who model the behaviours they expect from everyone else

Every one of these is a leadership behaviour, not a policy. And every one of them can be developed through focused, structured training and skills development. Learn more about Malcolm Gurley's approach to building culture through leadership development.

Why Are Managers the Most Important Factor in Company Culture?

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement declined for the second consecutive year in 2025, and that manager engagement specifically dropped from 31% in 2022 to just 22% in 2025, accounting for much of the overall decline. When managers are disengaged, overloaded, or poorly supported, their teams feel every bit of it.

This is the most important insight for any leader trying to build a better company culture: your organization's culture will never be stronger than the effectiveness of its managers. Employees do not separate their experience of the company from their experience of their direct manager. The two are the same thing in practice.

Developing your managers is therefore not a nice-to-have. It is the most direct path available to building a better company culture across your entire organization, from top to bottom.

What Does the Research Say About Building Company Culture?

What Are the Warning Signs That Your Company Culture Needs Work?

McLean and Company's 2026 Canadian employee engagement report found that only 23% of employees rated their leaders as highly effective, while 40% of employees reported higher job-related stress, suggesting that most Canadian organizations have significant untapped opportunity to improve culture through leadership development.

Here are the warning signs I look for when working with organizations trying to build a better company culture:

• High turnover, particularly among your best performers, who have the most options
• Low engagement scores that remain flat or decline year over year despite initiatives
• Leaders who were promoted for technical skill but were never developed as people leaders
• Reactive firefighting as the default mode, with little time for strategic or developmental work
• Exit interviews that reveal themes of feeling unrecognized, unheard, or directionless
• Visible silos between departments, with little cross-functional communication or trust

If any of these apply, the company culture issue is real and it is costing you. The good news is that culture can be changed deliberately, and the results are visible and measurable within months of starting the right program. Visit the FAQ page to read the most common questions about getting started.

How Do You Build a Better Company Culture Step by Step?

There is no shortcut to building a strong company culture, but there is a clear path. Here is how I approach it with organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, not-for-profit, engineering, and operations sectors in Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area:

1. Start with an honest assessment of your current leadership behaviours. Not what your leaders intend to do, but what the people around them actually experience. This is where culture lives.
2. Develop goal-setting skills at every leadership level. Clear, written, revisited goals are the single most powerful culture-building tool available. They create alignment, accountability, and a sense of progress.
3. Build consistent communication habits. Culture deteriorates in silence. Leaders who communicate regularly, honestly, and in both directions create an environment where people feel safe and informed.
4. Teach leaders to recognize contribution deliberately. Recognition is not a personality trait. It is a skill that can be developed. Organizations where recognition is consistent and specific have measurably stronger cultures.
5. Create visible growth paths inside the organization. People who can see a future inside your company are far less likely to look for one elsewhere.
6. Apply, track, and measure behavioural change over time. Culture is not built in a workshop. It is built through sustained application of new behaviours across multiple working sessions, tracked against real outcomes.

This is the structure of a proven program from Leadership Management International, customized to your organization. Each step is applied to your specific leaders, your specific goals, and your specific culture, with Malcolm Gurley directly involved throughout.

Frequently Asked Questions About Company Culture

How do I build a better company culture?

Build a better company culture by developing the daily behaviour of your leaders. Culture is what people experience in their interactions with their managers every day. When your leaders set clear goals, communicate consistently, recognize contribution, and invest in the people around them, a strong culture grows from the inside out. A proven program from Leadership Management International, customized to your organization, develops these leadership behaviours with measurable outcomes.

How do I get my leadership team aligned?

Leadership team alignment starts with shared goals and shared accountability. When every leader in your organization is working from the same clearly defined objectives, communicating in consistent ways, and holding themselves and their teams accountable to the same standards, alignment follows naturally. The most reliable way to achieve this is through structured leadership training and skills development applied to your real organizational goals, not a one-off workshop.

How do I knock down silos in my organization?

Silos form when leaders prioritize their own department's success over the organization's shared goals. The most effective way to break them down is to develop cross-functional goal alignment at the leadership level, combined with communication habits that create transparency and trust across departments. When leaders are developed to think about the whole organization, not just their area, silos dissolve over time.

What are the warning signs that my team is burning out?

Watch for your strongest contributors carrying disproportionate workloads, declining engagement during team meetings, rising errors or missed deadlines, and exit interviews pointing to themes of feeling unrecognized or directionless. These are culture problems at their root, driven by leadership gaps. Developing your managers directly addresses the behaviours that create burnout before your best people resign.

Do you work with companies in Durham Region on company culture?

Yes. Gurley Leadership Solutions is based in Ajax, Ontario and works directly with organizations across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area, including Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Pickering, Barrie, and Mississauga, across manufacturing, healthcare, not-for-profit, engineering, and operations sectors. Every program is delivered in person, customized to your organization, and tracked for measurable outcomes.

About the Author: Malcolm Gurley

Malcolm Gurley is President of Gurley Leadership Solutions Inc., based in Ajax, Ontario. With more than 35 years of senior executive experience at Fortune 100 and manufacturing organizations including Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Armstrong Fluid Technology, he helps organizations across the Greater Toronto Area and Durham Region build stronger company cultures by developing leadership effectiveness at every level. He is LMI Canada licensed, Lean Certified, and a Six Sigma Black Belt. Every program is a proven Leadership Management International program, customized to the organization, with a return on investment of typically 10:1 or better. Learn more about Malcolm Gurley and why organizations choose Gurley Leadership Solutions.