Most HR leaders rank culture among their most important assets. Ask them to define it, and the answers dissolve into jargon. That is the central finding driving Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, to challenge how chief people officers think about what culture actually is.
The Belief-Values Confusion
Collins draws a sharp line between two concepts that HR departments routinely conflate. Beliefs, in his framework, are the truths a company holds about the world. Values are what it considers important. Culture, he argues, starts with the former — not the latter.
'It was so many abstractions, so much jargon, and honestly, it was a plethora of nothingness,' Collins said of the answers he received when he asked chief people officers and recruiters to define culture.
His prescription is direct: leaders must ask themselves what they genuinely believe, then examine whether their organization's behaviors actually reflect those beliefs. Where belief and behavior diverge, the culture is already broken — regardless of what the company handbook says.
Wells Fargo as the Case Study
Collins points to Wells Fargo in the early 2000s as the clearest illustration of the disconnect. Employees opened unauthorized customer accounts under pressure to meet aggressive sales targets. The company publicly espoused values like trust and integrity, Collins said, but its behavior reflected a different underlying belief: that employees were expected to outperform at any cost. The gap between stated values and operational reality is precisely what Collins identifies as the root failure.
On the other end of the spectrum, Collins cites Patagonia as a company that has organized itself around a consistent, identifiable commitment — minimizing its environmental impact — and whose behaviors have tracked that belief over time.
What CHROs Should Do Differently
Collins urges HR heads to widen what he calls 'the aperture' of how they think about culture. The push, he said, is to 'first challenge the way you see the world' before attempting to build or repair a culture. Perks, rituals and mission statements are not substitutes for the fundamental beliefs that guide how a company actually operates.
For organizations struggling to retain top performers, the implication is uncomfortable but clear: if the company cannot articulate what it believes, it cannot attract or keep the people who share those beliefs.
The Bottom Line
From a free-enterprise standpoint, this is ultimately a productivity and capital-allocation problem. Talent is expensive to recruit and expensive to lose. When culture is reduced to a slide deck of aspirational values that bear no relationship to daily incentives — as the Wells Fargo example demonstrates — the organization pays twice: once in misconduct risk and once in turnover.
Collins is not selling a soft HR philosophy. He is making a hard business argument: beliefs drive behavior, behavior drives outcomes, and leaders who cannot name their beliefs are flying blind. The market, as always, will price that uncertainty into the talent it withholds.
