By Komal Somani Whole-time Director, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Human Resource Officer, ESDS
As a HR leader, I have sat in too many leadership off-sites where someone eventually sighs, “Does someone have an idea on how we actually change the culture?”
The room goes quiet because nobody really knows. Culture feels something opaque – everyone seems to know, but has been unable to grip. You can’t put it on a chart; you cannot assign it an owner. However, the smartest teams that
I have watched lately aren’t treating culture like an HR side-project anymore. They’re treating it like software: layered, measurable, iterable, and—crucially—something you can debug when it crashes.
They call it the Culture Stack. Six deliberate layers that fit together the way a modern tech stack does. Miss one layer and the whole thing wobbles and collapses. Nail all six and people stop talking about “culture fit.” They start talking about momentum.
Layer 1 – Core Beliefs (the kernel)
Everything starts here, but most companies never write it down in plain sentences. One leadership team I know spent three half-day sessions answering one question only: “What do we actually believe about people?” Not what sounds good on the website—what we will still believe at times when a big client is screaming.They landed on four core sentences. Those sentences now live in code (literally—new hires see them on day-one onboarding in the app) and in conversation (every tough decision gets stress-tested against them).
Layer 2 – Signature Behaviours (the application layer)
Beliefs are cheap. Behaviours are expensive. The best teams translate each belief into three or four observable moves. For example, if you believe “people grow through feedback,” then thanking someone publicly for tough feedback becomes a signature behavior. They track it the same way engineering tracks code reviews. No shaming, just gentle notifications
Layer 3 – Daily Processes (the middleware)
This is where culture usually dies—when the meeting cadence, the way decisions actually get made contradict the pretty words. One team rewrote their Monday all-hands from “status updates” to “celebrations only.” Fifteen minutes, every week, same script. Six months later the people said that the single biggest culture shift wasn’t a training program—it was that meeting that left them finally feeling human.
Layer 4 – Technology Enablers (the infrastructure)
Tools should make the desired behaviors stupidly easy and the old toxic ones friction-full. Want radical transparency? Put the strategy document in a place that everyone can comment, not in a slide deck that lives on the CEO’s laptop. Want psychological safety? Add a “no-meeting Wednesday” block that cannot be overridden without three levels of approval. The technology isn’t the culture, but bad technology can choke good culture faster than anything else.
Layer 5 – Rituals (the user experience)
These are the tiny repeated ceremonies that wire the behaviours into muscle memory. One company ends every single project with the same two questions: “What did we learn about our customers?” and “What did we learn about ourselves?” Another starts every quarter with a 90-minute “failure fair” where teams compete to tell the funniest, most expensive mistake they made last quarter. People laugh until they cry, then go on to build better things.
Layer 6 – Leadership Philosophy (continuous deployment)
This is the layer most executives pretend is not part of their culture. It is the whole thing. Leaders who say “We value truth” but go on to shoot the messenger do not need a better communication workshop. They need to change how they react in situations when revenue is down.
The new discipline: every leader has a “reaction log” for 30 days. They write down what they felt and what they did. Then they talk about it in small groups. Nothing fancy. Just brutal honesty in a safe space. Ninety days later, the entire tone of debate shifts.
Culture,hence, is not the soft stuff. It is the only stuff that matters.When you engineer it the way you engineer a product—layer by layer, with feedback loops and ruthless measurement—it stops being a hoping game and starts being the most powerful growth engine your organization has got.
Build the stack deliberately, maintain it religiously, and watch what happens when people do not just work inside your culture.They accelerate because of it.