Acceleration Through Culture Transformation: How Northwestern Mutual Is Preparing for the Next 165 Years

Snapshot

• Organization: Northwestern Mutual
• Industry: Financial services
• Headquarters: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Employees:  Approximately 8,300
• Focus: Enterprise culture transformation to support modernization, speed, and alignment

The Business Context

For more than 165 years, Northwestern Mutual has helped families and businesses achieve greater financial security. The financial services company, ranked No. 109 on the Fortune 500, serves more than 5 million clients across the United States. It is the nation’s leading direct provider of life insurance and one of the top independent broker-dealers of investments. Focused on growth, relevance and competitiveness, company leaders saw opportunities to accelerate how leaders align, make decisions, collaborate and execute across the enterprise.

At stake was the company’s ability to move with greater speed, clarity and consistency while preserving the strengths that have defined its legacy.

Culture Ownership at the Top

From the outset, the effort was embedded within Northwestern Mutual’s broader transformation agenda: increasing execution discipline, evolving its operating and workforce model, and strengthening enterprise alignment and accountability.

The expectation was explicit: Culture change starts with leaders. How leaders make decisions, set priorities, collaborate, and show up every day determines whether the organization can execute strategy at the required pace.

Kelly Culler, executive vice president and chief people officer, emphasized that this was not anHR initiative operating alongside the business. It was integral to how the business needed to operate.

“The work started immediately. As we onboarded a new CEO and formed a new leadership team, we used that moment to be clear about how we needed to operate differently. We were already talking about culture, not as a separate initiative, but as part of how the business would move forward. We did not waste time.” said Kelly Culler

The message was clear: To move faster, leaders would need a shared set of operating behaviors to guide decisions, tradeoffs and accountability.

The Business Reality: What to Preserve, and What Must Change

Leaders began with listening. Northwestern Mutual conducted an enterprisewide listening effort, including surveys, focus groups, and input from leaders across roles and levels, to understand how culture was experienced, not just how it was intended. The work was supported by i4cp Consulting and informed by its research-based Culture Renovation approach and external benchmarks.

The result was a credible fact base that clarified both what to preserve and what needed to change.

As Culler noted, “When the data comes directly from employees, it changes the conversation. It is no longer an opinion or a hypothesis. It becomes a reality leaders have to work with.”

Employee feedback was consistent and nuanced. Employees expressed strong pride in the company’s legacy, purpose, and stability, which they wanted to preserve. At the same time, they called for greater speed, clarity, and trust to meet evolving business and client demands. This dual mandate, preserving what differentiates the organization while addressing what slows execution, became a defining principle of the transformation.

Co‑Creation with Leaders and the Business

Culler and her senior leadership team worked directly with the findings to identify the cultural shifts needed to support the company’s strategy.

i4cp Consulting supported the process through benchmarking, research insights from other organizations, and facilitated working sessions that helped leaders navigate tradeoffs and enterprise priorities.

Through workshops and enterprise input, leaders co-created a culture architecture grounded in real business decisions rather than aspirational language. The process helped translate employee sentiment into actionable operating behaviors and a practical framework for execution.

The resulting culture pillars were:

• Connect with purpose
• Act with ownership
• Advance what’s next

Each pillar was supported by observable behaviors tied to prioritization, decision‑making, collaboration and accountability.

“When we stopped talking about culture as an HR concept and started talking about how work gets done, it resonated,” Perrone said. “The pillars gave leaders practical language for decision-making, prioritization and daily execution.”

Leader‑Led Activation and Accountability

Culture activation was embedded into leadership practices rather than added as a separate initiative. The chief people officer aligned the effort with senior team development, leadership expectations and enterprise priorities, beginning with the executive team.

“Alignment is more than agreement in the room. Each leader had to understand what this required of them and own their part of it. That is when it became clear: this was not HR’s culture strategy. It was their leadership strategy.” 

To reinforce accountability, Northwestern Mutual established a culture scorecard aligned with existing leadership metrics. The focus was on outcomes leaders could influence over time, including:

• Decision clarity and speed
• Quality of collaboration across the enterprise
• Follow‑through on commitments
• Leader role modeling of the culture pillars

“As part of that accountability model, culture is measured at the line-leader level and then rolled up, giving leaders visibility into adoption and reinforcing that culture is managed with the same discipline as other business priorities,” Perrone said.

As senior leaders modeled the behaviors, they reinforced a clear message: Expectations apply equally at the top. Culture is managed through visibility, reinforcement and accountability.

The Result: A Leadership‑Owned, Future‑Ready Foundation

The outcome is not a one‑time initiative, but a durable, leadership-owned foundation that  includes:

• A culture architecture aligned with the company’s legacy and strategy
• Clearly defined leadership behaviors co-created across the enterprise
• Measurement and reinforcement mechanisms that support sustained execution

“We are still early, but the signals are encouraging,” Culler said. “Leaders are beginning to use a more common language around decisions, ownership, and how teams work together. That is the work that has to happen before you see broader culture change take hold.”

How i4cp Consulting Supported the Work

 i4cp Consulting:

• Designed the enterprise listening approach
• Synthesized findings into a clear case for change
• Applied external benchmarks and high-performance workplace research
• Facilitated leadership discussions on priorities and tradeoffs
• Helped translate insights into actionable behaviors and culture architecture
• Supported the design of measurement and reinforcement mechanisms

“Partnering with i4cp helped us turn strong data into a clear case for action,” Perrone said. “It gave us a unifying voice and connected culture to how the business needs to operate.”

Why This Approach Aligns with i4cp Research

Northwestern Mutual’s approach reflects several patterns consistently associated with strong cultures and higher organizational performance, including broad employee listening, leadership behaviors aligned with strategy and disciplined measurement over time.

Most notably, culture is managed as a business priority, reinforced by the chief people officer and co-created across the organization.

By combining strong internal leadership with external research and advisory support, Northwestern Mutual has built a system for execution designed to help the organization adapt, perform, and thrive for the next 165 years.