As a finance professional, you may sigh when the topic of corporate culture comes up. You may see it as merely words on the break room wall, as an easy-to-ignore part of the employee handbook, or as frilly, frothy, or even low value. Leave us alone, you think; I have serious, consequential things to do.
And, of course, given your vital role as a financial steward in your company, you do have serious, consequential, and essential things to do — and plenty of them. But what if ignoring and disdaining your company’s culture means you are overlooking something vital about your role and your contribution, something you can’t measure, track, and dissect analytically?
Corporate culture defined
Culture is a company’s lived shared values. It reflects what is important to the company at its deepest level — its fundamental aspirations — and how that is demonstrated in the workplace. Culture won’t always be clearly articulated, and actual workplace behaviours may not consistently align with the company’s aspirations. But when they’re aligned well — when the aspirations are articulated clearly and are also actually lived out — culture is a powerful thing (see the sidebar “Finance’s Sub-culture”).
A PwC white paper for corporate boards provides these insights about corporate culture:
- “Corporate culture encompasses the beliefs and often–unspoken understandings that influence behaviour throughout the company.”
- “It’s the self–sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing.”
- “It is the foundation of ‘how we do things around here’.”
Another way to think about corporate culture is as the analogue to an individual’s character. You likely aspire to certain character traits — such as integrity, kindness, approachability, and self-control — and your behaviours sometimes align with those aspirations. But not always. The same is true with a company and the actual workplace behaviours of all its people. The values lived out together represent the company’s actual culture; those values may or may not consistently align with the company’s aspirations.
Why corporate culture should matter to you
Your own professional behaviours, your actions and interactions, add to the composite of your company’s culture. You are an inescapable part of the company’s culture, and that culture should matter to you.
Because the actual culture doesn’t always align with what you collectively say you value, you will regularly encounter (and sometimes cause) behavioural disappointments in the workplace. It also means, given your opportunities to do something about your actions, that you can individually and collectively work to strengthen and improve culture over time. You can choose to live out with greater consistency the values the company says are important.
4 steps to strengthen corporate culture
Creating a corporate culture that aligns values and workplace behaviours involves a process of assessment and engagement. Four steps can lead to behaviours that align with and demonstrate company aspirations day to day.
Understand your company’s values
First, you need to know your company’s espoused values. Does the company have a documented values or culture statement? If not, what values do the company’s mission, vision, community involvement, or social responsibility statements state or imply? In the absence of stated values, what values are simply non-negotiable for the role?
A respected community bank in Texas summarised its values this way: “Work hard, have fun, [and] make money, while providing outstanding customer service and honouring the Golden Rule.” This brief statement made the bank’s aspirational values clear. Being short, memorable, and vivid made the values easier for the bank’s staff to keep front of mind and more consistently live out.
Consider workplace behaviours
Second, think through what workplace behaviours demonstrate those values. Since culture is lived shared values, what does it look like and sound like when you live them out? For example, if innovation is an important value for your company, how do your actions and habits in your finance role support innovation? Are you and your team regularly providing financial and operational insights that help those in other functions innovate well, or are you effectively inhibiting innovation by, for instance, hoarding information or perpetuating siloed, bureaucratic processes?
If, as with the Texas bank, your company focuses on customer service, are you and your team ably and consistently serving your internal customers, those in other departments who directly or indirectly serve the company’s external customers? Or are you making it more challenging for them to take care of those customers?
Discuss culture with colleagues
Next, don’t labour alone in this process of assessment and adjustment. As you work on better aligning your own behaviours, make culture and its implications a topic of conversation. Talk about it with your colleagues, with your boss, and with your direct reports. Engage with departments that rely on your team’s work product and ask how you and your team can better demonstrate the company’s values in your cross-functional interactions.
When you or your team assists with analysis of strategic initiatives under consideration, don’t limit your observations to the merely financial. If you see the potential for the initiative to cause harm to the company’s espoused values, speak up. Management expects the finance team to bring financial insights to discussions about strategic matters; you strengthen your contribution when you accompany quantitative analysis with insightful perspectives about broader matters, including culture.
Self-assess your own behaviours
Finally, and most importantly, regularly assess how your own habitual behaviours align — or don’t — with what’s most important to the company. Hold yourself accountable. When you fall short — and you and all those around you will — pick yourself up, make amends, learn from it, and press forward with deepened resolve.
And while some behaviours will certainly be handled differently from one individual to another and from one company to another, adherence to the CIMA Code of Ethics for CIMA members and students and the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct for AICPA members is non-negotiable.
Cultural change takes time
You are part of your company’s culture. Inescapably. The positive, deliberate changes you make to strengthen culture make a difference. The difference may feel slight and the positive effects may not show up promptly, but investing time, intention, and energy into strengthening your own sliver of composite culture is always a good thing. Your company will benefit from it, as will the various constituencies your company touches.
Finance’s sub-culture
Every company has a culture that reflects its values. Departments inside the company often have their own sub-cultures, reflecting values that the department members live out together. You likely already sense this as you think about departments in your company. Different departments emphasise, value, and encourage different things, sometimes just because of leaders’ personalities and leadership styles, but sometimes because each department provides a different form of value to the whole.
This becomes a problem when a sub-culture clashes with the company’s culture. For example, a company focused on innovation suffers if any department, including finance, stifles or inhibits innovation.
But a sub-culture can be a healthy thing if the department’s values support or are at least not inconsistent with the company’s values and if the department’s values reflect the best of what that function’s contribution is to the whole.
For a finance department, values such as the following should be a given: integrity, accountability, excellence, collaboration, and a strong work ethic. Finance behaviours that don’t reflect those values lived out consistently are a prelude to disaster.
Eric R. Alexander, CPA, is a US-based consultant and former banking sector CFO. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.
LEARNING RESOURCE
Oversight of Corporate Culture: A Core Asset in Driving Performance
Led by an expert panel, this programme highlights leading practice on assessing and strengthening a company’s corporate culture, including how culture impacts strategy, risk, and performance.
COURSE
MEMBER RESOURCES
Articles
“Leadership Strategies to Enable a Team’s Success”, FM magazine, 12 May 2025
“How Values-Driven Companies Create a Recruitment and Retention Edge”, FM magazine, 28 April 2025
Podcast episodes
“Why the ‘Best Strategy in the World’ Will Fail Without Strong Culture”, FM magazine, 28 January 2026
“3 Common Types of Difficult People — and How to Work Better With Them”, FM magazine, 22 October 2025
