How to Make Culture a Strategic Imperative: Cummins CHRO Marvin Boakye

“We have a very long-tenured board member who said to me, ‘Every company has a culture, whether they know it or not. Very, very few companies have an intentional culture,’” says Marvin Boakye, the chief human resources officer at Cummins.

Few companies are more intentional than Cummins about building and maintaining the corporate culture. The multinational has been producing diesel engines and integrated power systems for over a century, ranks in the top 150 of the Fortune 500, and has generated significantly higher returns on invested capital than its industry peers for the past five years. In our research, Cummins ranked first among 39 large industrial companies in terms of how employees rated its culture and values on Glassdoor.

Companies with an intentional culture excel at integrating the specific core values leadership emphasizes — in Cummins’s case, integrity, diversity and inclusion, caring for employees, excellence, and teamwork. When we analyzed how employees at large companies described their culture in Glassdoor reviews, Cummins employees talked about diversity and inclusion much more positively (four standard deviations above the average) compared with employees in other industrial companies. Cummins employees also spoke more highly of all of the company’s other core values (one to two standard deviations above the average among industrials).

An effective culture, Boakye believes, is not only one that is intentionally created but also one whose leaders “believe that it has to be a strategic differentiator to how you operate your business.” Here, Boakye shares insights about how Cummins created and maintains a culture that translates the company’s core values into actions on a day-to-day basis throughout a global organization with nearly 75,000 employees.

1. Treat culture as a strategic imperative.

At Cummins, strategy and culture are two sides of the same coin. “We have a strong belief that our culture is a strategic differentiator to our business strategy,” Boakye said.

“I believe about 43% of our senior leadership team are women,” Boakye continued. “About 30% of our U.S. leadership team are Black or Latino. … The reason why we made that happen is because we believe that there is a strategic, competitive differentiator for us in this space. And not only do we believe it, but our customers know that as well. …We’ve brought more views, we’ve brought more innovation, [and] we’ve brought alternatives that people haven’t thought about that have changed our business.”

Corporate culture also helps Cummins attract diverse talent when many engineering-intensive companies are struggling to do so. “We are a very strong attractor of great talent and diverse talent,” Boakye said. “We hear candidates tell us, ‘I read your report, and that’s why I decided to come talk to you.’ … That’s really significant, that people are making those decisions.”

2. Top leaders commit to shaping the culture.

The commitment to a healthy culture spans generations at Cummins. “It goes back quite a ways,” Boakye said. “You have to take yourself back into the ’60s.” At that time, J. Irwin Miller served as chairman of Cummins while also leading the National Council of Churches and working with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to organize the March on Washington and, later, lobby for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Miller did “a tremendous amount of the work in setting a culture, setting a tone, setting deliberateness, setting a very clear perspective around how to address inequity, both within the company and around the United States and around the world. And that really shaped the company,” Boakye said. But it didn’t end with Miller. “As successive leaders have come in, they’ve all had different approaches to how they think about this work, of making it deliberate,” he noted.

3. When someone is a poor cultural fit, recognize it and address it.

“When you have a culture like this,” Boakye said, “you want to give people the ability to self-select out. This kind of culture is not for everyone. … So if someone is in one of our development sessions and says, ‘You know what? This has really been helpful; I’ve realized I don’t know if this is for me,’ that is also a success for us.

“We have had people self-select out, and we’ve also selected people out when their behaviors … have not matched with what we believe is important,” he explained. “You know, when we’ve had situations where we had to say, ‘This is not working,’ most of the time, it’s not been based on their ability to achieve results. It’s been based on how they go about doing it within the organization. And we make that very clear.”

4. Translate core values into leadership behaviors.

Cummins’s top leadership team is intentional about translating the company’s cultural values into clear expectations about managers’ leadership behavior. As Boakye explained, “When I talk about how we take care of our employees, it’s not just something we put on paper, but we actually demonstrate it through actions … and there’s a significant amount of time and input that is put into making that happen. … We have a high expectation that when you are a leader, a significant amount of your time is spent on the development of your teams, whether that is setting clear targets [and] clear performance expectations, to what you do to create an environment that enables people to be successful.”

At Cummins, accountability for consistently demonstrating leadership behaviors starts at the top. “Our current CEO, Jennifer Rumsey, has said, ‘This is the work, team. Let’s make that very clear. And so if you don’t have time to do this, then you’re not doing the work that is important to being a successful and differentiated company.’”

There are three keys to translating values into action, Boakye said: “First, it’s a clear philosophy. Second, it’s a clear expectation that leaders spend time working on this. Third, it is not an add-on — it is the work.”

5. Maintain your core values, but evolve leadership behaviors.

“I’m very big on understanding what differentiates us,” Boakye said, but leaders should also recognize that there are core beliefs that people share. “The concept of integrity tends to stand no matter where we are, from a culture perspective. And the concept of caring for yourself and for those around you, no matter what culture we have, tends to be consistent.”

However, as Cummins has begun to move toward its ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, it has had to evolve how the core value of teamwork shapes decision-making. “How we make decisions is a critical part of our culture,” Boakye observed. “We are a very collaborative culture. A lot of people get involved with decisions. … One of the downsides is, everyone believes they have the ability to say no, and, as a result, it stops the work. And what this has led to is a really major challenge in speed to make decisions. … That’s not something you can afford with the pace of change that we need to drive.”

Cummins’s top leadership team has tested and refined a new approach to making faster decisions while preserving the company’s strong sense of teamwork. “We’ve been working,” Boakye said, “reworking to make that the behavior before we then take it to the rest of the organization.”

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