In this post: Lexitas Pharma Services CEO and Executive Chairwoman Jeanne Hecht argues that culture belongs to the CEO, not HR. She explains how her team measures, reinforces, and protects it every month across a largely remote workforce.
After Jeanne Hecht spoke to a group of women leaders, the head of human resources at another company came up to her with a confession.
"I can't get my CEO to believe that people aren't replaceable," the woman told her. The result, she said, was high turnover and a toxic culture. When she raised the problem, her CEO told her it was HR's job to fix it.
Hecht, CEO and Executive Chairwoman of Lexitas Pharma Services, a global clinical research organization focused on ophthalmology, has a blunt response. "It is not HR's job to fix it," she said on Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group. "It is a full team effort led by, supported by, and quite frankly somewhat enforced by the CEO."
Hecht worked as a pharmacy technician, project manager, sales rep, and head of operations over more than 30 years in the industry before moving into the C-suite. Her view of the CEO's job is simple: If culture matters, the person at the top has to carry it.
"Building culture in a highly effective leadership team and a highly engaged workforce is a full contact sport," Hecht said. "It's not for the faint of heart."
It takes effort "from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top," she said, and it leaves no room for people who are not committed. Hecht has worked inside toxic cultures and knows the type: A group reaches an agreement, "and then you leave the meeting and then this one person starts going around trying to erode the trust and the agreement that was made."
That starts with the leadership team. Hecht said she has made some wrong hires, "and those folks are no longer here." The team she has now is fully committed, and it treats culture as a constant priority. "It's not something that we just pick up every Friday at 2 in the afternoon," she said. "It's something that we talk about daily." Michael Dixon made a similar case for intentional culture.
Her reason is personal. "We spend too much time at work for any of us to work in a culture that we don't like," she said.
When Hecht took over, the company's vision was to be the premier ophthalmic product development partner. She said it was undifferentiated and "doesn't get me out of bed."
In January 2024, the leadership team rewrote it. "Let's just make it really simple," Hecht said. "We want to change the way people see the world." The company pursues that vision by being an employer of choice and a partner of choice worldwide.
The new wording also set limits. "That tells you we're committed to ophthalmology," she said. "So I'm not going out and running a cardiovascular study or Crohn's program."
Lexitas keeps a strategy on a page and a culture on a page, and each shapes the other. "If I didn't have those two things connected, there's no focus and no direction for the company," Hecht said.
To make the vision stick, the team built a pyramid with the patient at the top, followed by vision, mission, and values at the company, team, and individual levels. That slide opens every training, onboarding session, hiring conversation, town hall, key business review, and board meeting.
"It is not HR's job to fix it. It is a full team effort led by, supported by, and quite frankly somewhat enforced by the CEO."
Jeanne Hecht, CEO and Executive Chairwoman, Lexitas Pharma Services
Asked for the best leadership advice she has received, Hecht cited a line she says she has repeated constantly: You get what you organize, measure, and incentivize. "If you don't have the metrics and you don't incentivize against those metrics, you're going to be lost," she said.
She applies it to culture. "I don't just mean by employee engagement score that's done once a year," she said. Lexitas tracks pulse surveys, voluntary turnover, and regrettable losses, and uses a nine-box program to decide how to invest in talent. The team reviews the metrics monthly. When one slips, the team builds an action plan it calls an A3 to get back on track.
New hires get checkpoints at 30, 60, and 90 days. When someone is the wrong fit, Hecht said, it usually comes down to a cultural mismatch, because "nobody gets up and goes, I want to go do a really bad job today."
Employees are also measured on the values: accountable, authentic, and passionate for individuals, and innovative, collaborative, and respectful for teams. Colleagues nominate one another for the Seymour Circle, named for the company's mascot, and winners are recognized at the town hall. See also Jackie Fisher on the business case for culture.
The numbers carry real stakes. Some of the company's contracts include bonus penalties tied to team turnover. Hecht said she is willing to accept that risk "because we have such an engaged culture."
FREE ONE-PAGE CHECKLIST
Use it to choose monthly culture metrics, set an action-plan trigger, and build early-warning listening channels.
Most Lexitas employees work remotely, with a small office in Raleigh. So Hecht built listening channels. She hosts Java with Jeanne round tables, sending participants a Starbucks gift card before an open conversation. Her head of HR runs Mochas with Michelle. An employee engagement committee, skip-level discussions, and pulse surveys fill in the rest.
The goal, she said, is honesty about the results. "I want to make sure we're not drinking our own Kool-Aid," she said. Her biggest worry is "taking our eye off it because our results are good."
That worry got a test this year, when one client hired away three of her people. Hecht acknowledged she cannot always compete with Big Pharma. She still asked her leadership team whether they had missed the warning signs "because we were so focused on how well we did last year."
At a recent leadership off-site, Hecht's CFO summed up the culture in one line: The team does serious work but does not take itself too seriously. Lexitas wrote that into its strategy and its culture.
The fun is deliberate. Her chief medical officer, a former military pilot, gave the leadership team call signs. Hecht's is Miracle Whip. But she said the lighter touches rest on "how you treat people and how you want to be treated." She has watched strong leaders sabotage themselves by being charming in meetings while teasing colleagues behind their backs. "I don't like drama and I don't do well with drama," she said.
HOW VELOCITY HELPS
Hecht treats culture the way most CEOs treat revenue: measured monthly, reviewed by the leadership team, and corrected the moment it slips. Velocity's Culture and Engagement work gives leaders the same clarity through culture assessments, engagement surveys, and stakeholder interviews that show where commitment is strong and where it is eroding. The High Performance Culture Workshop then helps leadership teams connect culture to strategy and turn their findings into daily behaviors that last.
See how Velocity works with professional services firms.
Asked for her final thought, Hecht returned to her CFO's line. "We do serious work and we don't take ourselves too seriously," she said. "Building culture is serious work, but have fun while you're doing it."
The lesson for leaders is ownership. Culture will not survive as a line on the wall or a task handed to HR. It lasts when the CEO organizes it, measures it, rewards it, and shows up for it every day.
Hear Jeanne Hecht's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Follow Jeanne on LinkedIn.
FREE GUIDE
Hecht's best leadership advice is that you get what you organize, measure, and incentivize. This framework helps you make sure what you measure and reward matches the culture you say you want.