Act Like an Owner — How Corporate Culture Really Gets Built

Episode 227 of The Executive Edge podcast - with Greg Hawks, Corporate Culture Specialist

What if the problem with employee engagement isn’t the disengaged — it’s the people you’ve been tolerating?

That’s the starting point for this week’s conversation with Greg Hawks, corporate culture specialist, keynote speaker, and author of Act Like an Owner: Five Unlocks for Creating Culture People Love and Results People Need.

Greg has spent 15 years helping organisations build environments where people genuinely buy in — and his framework is built around three types of employee.

Owners, Renters, and Vandals

Greg’s model comes from an unlikely place: his own experience as a property investor. Tenants, he noticed, behaved in exactly the same ways as employees.

Owners bring their heart, head, and hands. They’re imaginative, invested, and care about outcomes. Greg’s view is that everyone starts day one with an owner’s mindset — the question is what the organisation does to it from there.

Renters show up, do a decent job, and go home. Gallup’s 25 years of data puts this at around 50% of the workforce. These aren’t bad people — they’ve simply learned that going above and beyond doesn’t pay off. The environment trained them out of it.

Vandals are the silent saboteurs. The gossips. The ones who say “I knew that was never going to happen” — and then use the failure as proof. They’re not just disengaged; they’re actively working against forward momentum.

Why Leaders Tolerate Vandals (and shouldn’t!)

The uncomfortable truth in business is this: vandals often survive because they’re high revenue generators. Removing them feels risky — and in the short term, it is. But the longer you leave them in place, the more your “renters” disengage, because they can see that poor behaviour goes unchallenged.

Greg’s data-backed case is straightforward: when you deal with vandals, ownership goes up. It takes time to rebuild trust, but the environment shifts.

With renters, the approach is different. Greg talks about creating a “lease purchase option” — helping people find their way back in by connecting the dots between their day-to-day work and what actually matters to them. That’s a leadership responsibility, not something most people can do on their own. It comes up particularly in M&A situations, where acquired employees slip into renter mode not because they’re poor performers, but because no one’s helped them see themselves in the new culture.

Thinking Whole House, Not Just Your Room

One of the principles in Greg’s new book is the idea of “thinking whole house.” People live in their departments — their rooms — and it’s natural. But rooms only have value as part of a house. When leaders start believing their room matters more than the whole, that’s where silos and division take root. The shift Greg advocates is simple but significant: I serve this room, but I’m here for the house.

Your One Takeaway

Name the vandals in your business — then act.

Before you focus on re-engaging the “renters” in your business, look honestly at who in your organisation is working against the culture you’re trying to build. The person who never thinks the new initiative will work, and makes sure everyone knows it. The one who operates outside normal expectations because they produce results and you’ve let it go.

Ask yourself: what does tolerating that behaviour tell everyone else?

You don’t need to act overnight. But start by naming it clearly — to yourself first.

Act Like an Owner is available on Amazon in hardback, Kindle, and audiobook — read by Greg. Find him at greghawks.com.