When companies want to address fragmented cultures, they do some of the oddest things. For example, we’ve seen at least 15 corporations put “one” in front of their name (as in, “One Acme”), as they launched campaigns to dramatically increase interconnection across the organization.

As if that would work.

Fragmentation is a natural byproduct of scaling. Whether your company has reached $20 million or $20 billion, the routine mitosis of growth will eventually divide your organization into pieces. Designing an organization that remains cohesive even as it grows is hard work, and unfortunately, most leaders take the easy way out. Like new home owners who simply paint over rotted siding, executives take dangerously superficial approaches to unifying organizations, ignoring how splintered theirs really are. They forfeit the organizational magic where everyone feels part of something greater than themselves.

As I’ve worked with companies for 30 years, I’ve observed a recurring management vice I’ve called “faux-hesion”… the institutionalized pretense of unity. Here are the three most lethal “faux-hesion” culprits that do more to undermine unity than create it.

1. Declaring big targets in lieu of having a real strategy. The single most unifying factor of an organization is a widely known, enthusiastically embraced strategy. It’s astounding how many organizations don’t have one. If you go around the room and ask members of the executive team “What’s our strategy?” you’ll likely get many different answers. Sales and product quotas, growth targets, and mission statements are widespread counterfeits. One McKinsey study of 2,135 executives revealed that most corporate strategies “developed idiosyncratically to their organizations, people, and markets,” and don’t pass more than three out of 10 core tests for viable strategy.

Big targets intended to “rally” the organization are notorious substitutes for shared direction. “We will be the #1 provider of…” or “We will be the fastest growing…” or “We will dominate…” There’s nothing wrong with ambitions that inspire organizations to stretch. But declaring big targets doesn’t unify organizations to reach them. It may whip them into a brief frenzy of enthusiasm, but once the hype settles, it’s back to business as usual.

Declaring big targets that simply aren’t attainable undermine executive credibility and employee commitment. Big targets can hence backfire, leading to inertia and weakening cohesion. To truly align their organizations, leaders must create substantiated plans that define competitive distinction, differentiated capabilities, core customers, and priority investments.

2. Using values to cover up cultural deficits. Most companies have published values, like integrity, innovation, teamwork, customer service, sustainability, or respect. A toxic culture, pervasive unwanted behavior, or a need for organization change can prompt leaders to ramp up focus on “values.” Underneath the pithy words is often the insidious intention to correct. “Speed” suddenly becomes a value when time to market cycles are industry lagging. “Integrity” becomes a value when there’s been a scandal. When a new value is declared with the unspoken intention of fixing the people asked to embrace it, you can bet embracing it is the last thing that happens. We watched one CEO hire a marketing firm to generate a set of catchy phrases to change a culture, all of which were antithetical to the existing culture. The multi-million dollar effort was crushed by its own weight.

When there is no consequence for violating stated values, the resultant cynicism and duplicity sabotage performance. Worse, values become a weapon used to expose the hypocrisy of leaders whose failure to model them becomes everyone else’s excuse not to, either. True cultural norms drive results, are consistent with strategy, and engender strong communal pride. Values that everyone knows mean nothing weaken cohesion, and with it, confidence and passion. That leaves behind shame and cowardice to shape behavior. The performance consequence can’t be ignored.

One comprehensive study based on more than 1,000 firms in the Great Places to Work database reveals a strong correlation between the corporate financial performance and the extent to which employees believe their company’s espoused values are practiced. A company’s values must reflect what makes it uniquely successful, conveying to employees, This is what it takes to succeed here. From strategy to HR processes, weave them deeply into the organization’s fabric with undeniable consistency between actions and words.

3. Generating lots of meetings and reports instead of implementing clear decision-making processes. I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard the complaint, “We spend all our time in unproductive meetings and generating useless reports, so we have to do our ‘day jobs’ at night.” Excessive meetings and worthless reports are a sign of poor or non-existent governance. When decision rights are not carefully distributed with the requisite authority and resources, councils and committees proliferate like a bad flu. Piles of presentations and spreadsheets justify the meetings’ value as evidence of productivity. Owners of these groups and reports frantically cling to them as emblems heralding their indispensability.

When people in the organization spend a lot of time together — whether on reports or meetings — of course it feels like you’re cohesive. After all, you’re together for hours and hours of out of every day. (The average person has 62 meetings per month.) But simply breathing the same air does not result in cohesion, and in fact, usually backfires as people eventually resent the useless meetings and the people in them. And the waste of such an approach can’t be overstated. One organizational diagnosis we conducted revealed their top 400 leaders spent more than 57,000 hours per year in meetings. That equates to six and a half years. Leaders should clearly distribute decision rights and authority over resources in a coordinated fashion across the organization. This will speed execution and free capacity because the only needed meetings and reports are those tied to a broadly coordinated set of management processes that link the organization together.

Organizational unity isn’t a mysterious phenomenon – just a tough one to achieve. It doesn’t happen by sprinkling “cohesion pixie dust” over the organization in the forms discussed above. A harmonious, cohesive organization that consistently outperforms competitors happens because you do the hard work to build and maintain it.