At the beginning of my career, I worked for the health-care-software specialist HBOC. One day, a woman from human resources came into the cafeteria with a roll of tape and began sticking posters on the walls. They proclaimed in royal blue the company’s values: “Transparency, Respect, Integrity, Honesty.” The next day we received wallet-sized plastic cards with the same words and were asked to memorize them so that we could incorporate them into our actions. The following year, when management was indicted on 17 counts of conspiracy and fraud, we learned what the company’s values really were.

Ever since Peter Drucker famously declared that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” there has been a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their corporate culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that guides employee behavior. Which raises the question: If culture eats strategy for breakfast, how should you be cooking it?

I have been studying culture in organizations in my roles as a professor and as an adviser to businesses for the past 20 years. I have looked at companies that have struggled to build cultures that shape the behavior of their employees—and at a few that seem to have cracked the code. In this article I draw on that experience to offer six simple guidelines to help managers who are confronting the challenges of culture building.

[Here is the first.]

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when articulating their desired organizational culture is to focus on abstract absolute positives (integrity, respect, trust, and so on). Take integrity. Virtually all leaders want their employees to behave with it. Indeed, there is really no credible alternative to integrity as an articulated value. Never have I come across an organization that said, “In this company, we are all about corruption.”

When you articulate your culture using absolute positives, it makes a statement, but it’s unlikely to drive the day-to-day decision-making (and therefore the behavior) of your workforce. The trick to making a desired culture come alive is to debate and articulate it using dilemmas. If you identify the tough dilemmas your employees routinely face and clearly state how they should be resolved—“In this company, when we come across this dilemma, we turn left”—then your desired culture will take root and influence the behavior of the team.

Here is one example that I have used in my own work.

Dilemma:

You manage a small team of eight marketing specialists. The team is hardworking and collaborative. Yet you have been in discussions with your boss about a possible organizational change that might take place in four months, which would have a significant impact on your department. Employees would be shuffled around with new bosses and teammates. Some might be asked to move to new locations. This is about 60% likely to happen. Will you share this information with your team now?

Option A:

Lean toward team stability. Keep quiet for now. Your team is in a groove. You don’t know if the changes will happen. If you tell your employees, they are likely to panic and become distracted, leading to stress and wasted time. Some team members might decide to leave the group in search of stability. Why cause worry and distraction when so much is unknown?

Option B:

Lean toward transparency. Tell them what you know. When you are up-front with your employees, it breeds trust. If you were in their shoes, you would want to know. You seek to treat employees like adults, leading them to behave like adults. Adults can handle (and deserve) the truth. Why wait and allow rumors or whispered half-truths to circulate?

Both options are credible and defensible responses to the dilemma. I’ve presented it to hundreds of managers in dozens of organizations, and I’ve found that about 45% choose to share the information, and just over half lean toward keeping the information quiet for now

In which direction would you like your managers to lean? If your goal is stability, you want managers to choose the first option. Tell them, “In this company, our goal is to keep all employees sheltered from distraction. We have a lot to get done, and everyone should be laser-focused on the task at hand.” If your organization wants to foster a culture that’s all about transparency, tell your workforce, “In this company, our leaders share information like crazy. Even when the cost is inefficiency or distraught feelings, we tell you what we know.”

When employees face situations with various credible responses, they can either make a choice based on personal preference or be guided by the culture of the company. When developing your culture, consider those moments when your employees face critical decision-making dilemmas, vigorously debate potential responses, and create value statements that will clearly guide employees’ actions.