Building a Consistently Excellent Culture: Bain’s Manny Maceda

The strongest corporate cultures have a handful of core values that are deeply held by employees, shared widely throughout the organization, and consistently shape people’s behavior. But most organizations struggle to achieve cultural consistency: Distinctive microcultures coexist, acquired companies retain their legacy cultures, and adherence to core values decays over time.

Management consulting firm Bain & Company is an exception, based on our study of culture at more than 400 large companies. Bain also ranked first among all large U.S. employers on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work 2024 list, a distinction the company has achieved on five other occasions. Even more impressive, its culture has been consistently excellent over time and across geographies. Bain has been the top-ranked consulting firm on Glassdoor for 10 years in a row. When we analyzed how employees at global consulting firms rated their work culture by region, Bain ranked first in 18 of 22 countries.

We recently discussed Bain’s award-winning culture with Manny Maceda, who joined the firm in 1989 and is currently worldwide managing partner emeritus and incoming chair (effective January 2025). During that 35-year span, it became increasingly difficult to maintain cultural consistency, he said. “We went from five offices to 68 offices around the world … from recruiting from five schools to many schools … from hiring mostly MBAs to now data scientists and advanced analytics … and then we started acquiring companies,” Maceda observed.

Based on his experience at Bain, Maceda shared tips on maintaining a consistently healthy culture even as the diversity of employees, offices, and practice areas increases over time.

1. Leaders don’t delegate the work of reinforcing culture.

A common feature among strong cultures we’ve studied is that leaders use their people processes as tools to reinforce desired values and behaviors. Recruiting and training, for example, are not only deployed to hire great talent and build skills but also to reinforce corporate culture. These people processes are most effective when they heavily involve leaders who embody the desired culture.

When Maceda graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management, he had job offers from the three leading consulting firms but chose Bain because he bonded with all of the consultants who interviewed him. “You [must] have your senior team, your people who embody and manifest your culture, also involved in how you pick people,” he advised. “It continues to be part of my responsibility as a partner, and even as a CEO, to get involved in recruiting the highest-potential people as they’re coming up, because that’s the only way you can actually make culture feel different.”

Training is another powerful way to impart culture, Maceda explained. “We very rarely outsource training,” he said. “By and large, all our internal training programs at each level are also done by our leaders — manager training, partner training, senior partner training, new consultant training. It’s done by the team. … Those training programs become important cultural reinforcement.”

These people processes are most powerful when they are deployed in a coordinated fashion. Bain’s suite of tools for bolstering culture, Maceda said, includes statements of values, compensation, promotion systems, training systems, and informal reinforcements like awards. All of those approaches align to collectively reinforce Bain’s core values.

2. Explicitly link culture to value creation.

Making a clear business case for how culture creates economic value can help justify the investments required to build and maintain that culture. A clear link between core values and economic value can sustain leadership commitment to culture, even through downturns and market headwinds. When discussing culture within Bain, Maceda said, “There has to be clarity that all of this actually results in outcomes.”

Maceda sees a clear link between a culture that attracts, develops, and retains the best talent and Bain’s financial success. “Human capital matters to every company,” he noted. “It just matters so much to us because our product is us. We’re not selling a car or a phone or a shoe. We’re selling the people of Bain to solve a company’s problem.” Retaining great people pays off because “clients prefer trusted advisers that know them and are sticking around,” he added.

Bain’s five core values (which it refers to as “operating principles”) support value creation by balancing the needs of clients and employees. The values, Maceda said, “build a loyal talent workforce that’s equally focused on developing their people as they are on serving the needs of our clients. … If you look at those five [operating principles], some of them are directed for what we do with clients. Some are directed at what we do with each other.”

3. Measure employee Net Promoter Scores for individual leaders.

When many organizations administer a companywide survey, typically every year or two, they ask whether employees would recommend the company as a place to work. This aggregate and infrequent data provides limited useful guidance to improve culture. Bain takes a different tack: It invented the Net Promoter Score to assess whether customers would recommend a company, and it takes a similar approach to evaluating its own leaders.

Maceda elaborated: “We do two versions of [Net Promoter Scores] that apply to talent. We have Net Promoter Scores around your team because often our leaders are responsible for the success of an entire team.” Consultants are asked how likely they would be to recommend working on a specific team project. “We also have Net Promoter Scores for individuals,” Maceda said, where consultants are asked how much they would like to work with a particular leader again.

Employee Net Promoter Scores matter only if an organization acts on the feedback, and Bain does. “Before you get promoted to the next level, you will be evaluated,” Maceda explained. “How are your employee Net Promoter Scores, both [for] teams and as an individual supervisor? And I can tell you, the biggest moment of truth in the personal [and] in the professional development of our leaders is when you become a partner, if you become a partner. … The single biggest variant or factor in why someone doesn’t get promoted to partner is because their team advocacy is not as high as it should be.”

4. Utilize the power of formal and informal recognition.

Formal processes like recruiting, training, managerial feedback, and promotion are powerful tools to reinforce a culture. But social recognition of employees who exemplify the desired values can also play an important role in solidifying corporate culture.

“Informal recognition matters,” Maceda said. “Bain doesn’t have many awards. We only have three really global awards, so they are cherished in our company. One of them — it’s called the Bright-Dix Award — was named for two of our leaders who died many years ago in the Pan Am Lockerbie crash over Scotland in the early ’90s. And they were both good people leaders. So every year, globally, one or two people get named the Bright-Dix Award winner. And it’s an emotional ceremony. The families of those two, Nicholas and Peter, still show up. The kids and their grandkids now [attend], but it’s all about who has demonstrated the culture of training and helping others.”

Want to hear more advice from Maceda? Watch this conversation and the entire series on the CultureX YouTube channel, on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.