Culture and strategy are related, although never perfectly. Take some daily routines in organisational life. Do employees engage in meetings or do they multi-task to the point of rudeness through displays of “being above the details”? Do they share information freely or is the best stuff kept in silos? 

Of course, not all elements of culture will have an impact on a company’s strategy. For example, overly polite meeting cultures do not necessarily mean that dogma is never challenged. But many elements will, some more than others depending on the strategic orientation of the company. Here are some possible orientations: 

• Product/innovation leadership: Staying collectively curious, with longer horizons for thinking and a shared assumption that ambiguity and failure are not “bad”.
• Operational excellence: Strong discipline in following standards and processes while constantly looking for ways to optimise local routines.
• Customer intimacy: Listen to customers with a deeply shared assumption that making exceptions and customised solutions for customers are expected. 

Any company that wants to enhance performance will eventually embark on a culture alignment programme, which can mean culture change. The problem is that companies too often stumble. The reason: organisations address culture through espoused values and HR programmes, without an accurate understanding of the existing culture. 

By existing culture, I mean a true representation of the routines, processes and habits within a firm, and the underlying assumptions they reveal. Most organisations would have formal structures, but there are also many undocumented and poorly understood habits that allow work to happen: online chats, social networks and informal lines of authority. Even formal structures can look very different on paper versus reality. 

When attempting to align culture to strategy, most organisations operate at one or two levels: the macro/philosophical, which is mostly about espousing values, and the micro/local, which often takes the form of ticking boxes for individual behaviour. What’s missing is the vast meso level – where the real factors that shape routines and habits sit. Failing to address those structural pulleys and levers will undermine any cultural change effort.

Culture work is analytical, not (just) philosophical

Before leaders can reasonably align culture with strategy, they need to understand the existing culture. This sounds obvious, but it is neither common nor easy. It is too tempting to confuse a company’s espoused values with what it actually does, then simply rewrite those values in fresher terms. What’s needed instead is a cold, hard look at reality. 

To do this, leaders must think like anthropologists, approaching culture work with an analytical lens and genuine curiosity. While what Edgar Schein called “artifacts” – the routines, habits, structures, language and symbols that we see around us –are not always physical objects, they form the concrete reality of organisational life. Examples include meeting discipline, decision-making norms, office layout, Zoom habits, etc.

Crucially, interpreting artifacts requires challenging your own assumptions. Consider two contrasting offices: one open-plan with modern glass dividers, the other traditional with small individual offices and (shock and horror) doors. Without examining lived experience, we might infer that the former is an open, modern and collaborative culture, while the latter is restrictive and hierarchical. Yet closer analysis might reveal the opposite. 

The open-plan office may reflect a lack of trust from leadership, creating a sense of surveillance and reinforcing hierarchy such that people beg to work from home due to the fishbowl feel of the office. The smaller offices may exist because management trusts its people and understands the need for privacy and concentration. The artifact itself tells us little without careful interpretation. And interpretation cannot come without artifacts (data). And so, studying organisational artifacts should be an iterative process, homing in on the real lived experience. This is careful work that requires leaders to abandon some of their pre-conceived interpretations.

The point is that serious analysis – triangulating observations and lived experienced – is necessary. And you might find some pleasant surprises: routines and processes that align beautifully with strategy, without leadership having been aware of them. These are things to preserve, not inadvertently destroy. Increasingly, the volume of data captured within organisations, combined with natural language processing (NLP) and AI techniques, will create new opportunities to surface and analyse cultural behaviours (responsibly, I hope). Through thoughtful analysis, you’ll be in a better position to understand how the context people face every day may be contributing to the misfit between strategy and culture. 

Target change at the meso-level

Once you have a clearer picture of real corporate culture, how to do you shape it? The typical starting point is what I call a “dump and run”: new (or refreshed) value statements are issued, a culture programme is launched by HR, follow-up is limited and then everyone moves on. In the worst cases, these operate like popcorn flicks – momentary attention grabbers with no lasting impact.

This macro approach, whereby a top-level vision for the needed culture is cascaded, is a useful and necessary step – but it’s unlikely to be enough. If we’re lucky, it is followed by a micro step: HR reprogramming performance reviews to include behavioural attributes, some measures of individual attitudes and mindset. Again, useful –but not enough.

What is often overlooked is the messy middle of organisational design. Let me be more specific. Here are 10 main levers that management can control, which are likely to shape the context of an organisation:

1. Hiring policies and search criteria
2. Company structures and decision rights
3. Performance management and KPIs
4. Incentives and compensation
5. Leadership and team decision processes
6. Training and leadership development
7. Standard operating procedures for client and partner interactions
8. Networking and physical layout
9. Leadership role-modeling and how unscripted conflicts are resolved
10. Communication, including internal narratives and interpretations

Let me add a bonus item 11: Culture “booklets” that outline the new desired culture. Yes, these can be useful, but not on its own. There are obviously more elements that just 10, but you get the idea. 

The point is that these meso features encode the context that people live in every day. This is where deeper assumptions must be confronted and reshaped. These meso structural elements shape how work gets done and determine whether strategic priorities can be translated into everyday behaviour. For instance, if hierarchy and physical separation make collaboration difficult, then espousing collaboration as a value will not be enough to produce meaningful change. Because culture is intangible, trying to preach it into place is not likely to be effective. Culture is shaped through the consistent alignment of these structural elements with the broader vision, purpose and strategy of the company. In that sense, culture change is not about doing a hundred things. It’s about doing two or three things a hundred times.

A framework, not a formula

To summarise, culture alignment operates across three levels. At the macro level, the questions we should be asking are: What does our strategy require from our culture? What is the vision, the central tenets and the narrative for that evolution? At the meso level, it is about how we adjust the levers of management to shape the context that drives those ideas. And finally, at the micro level, we should be asking: How do we capture and reinforce behavioural change? Are we forming new habits? 

Culture alignment is hard work. But organisations that analyse their existing culture rigorously, surface and challenge underlying assumptions, and redesign structures to support the behaviours they need will be far better placed to improve performance. These steps don’t constitute a formula, but it's a good place to start.