Culture Is a Strategy, Not a Side Effect

Most executives will tell you culture matters. Yet many organizations still treat it as something that emerges from good work — a byproduct of hiring well, setting direction, and achieving results. Get the strategy right, get the right people in the room, and culture will take care of itself.

I have never seen it work that way.

Culture always emerges. The question is whether it is built deliberately or left to chance.

And organizations that leave it to chance are making a bet they may not realize they are making.

Culture is not atmosphere

One of the persistent misconceptions about culture is that it is atmosphere: the feeling in a room, the tone of a town hall, whether people seem energized on a given Tuesday.

It is discussed at retreats, measured through surveys, and invoked when engagement scores fall or something goes wrong. It is real, but it is often treated as downstream from the "actual" work of strategy, operations, finance, and results.

That view is limiting.

Culture determines a great deal about how the actual work gets done. It shapes whether people share information across organizational boundaries or hold it closely. Whether they surface concerns early or wait until a problem becomes difficult to contain. Whether they ask for help. Whether people with different expertise challenge one another's assumptions. Whether a leader can say, "I don't know." Whether teams understand success as delivering their own piece of the work or contributing to the performance of the whole.

Those are not questions of atmosphere. They are questions of organizational capability.

Culture is what people learn by watching

Culture is not the values statement in the lobby or the slide deck from the last retreat. Those things can matter, but only if they reflect something more consistent underneath.

Culture is the accumulated consequence of thousands of ordinary leadership decisions.

Who gets promoted. Who gets listened to. Who gets challenged. Who is trusted with difficult information. Who is invited into the room. Who is protected from accountability. How bad news travels. How disagreement is handled. Whether a mistake is hidden, punished, or treated as something to learn from.

People learn the real culture by watching what happens, not by reading what is written down. They notice what leaders praise publicly and what they tolerate quietly. They notice whether collaboration is celebrated in principle while individual heroics are rewarded in practice. They notice whether leaders ask for candor and then become defensive when they receive it.

Over time, the gap between stated values and lived behavior becomes the culture, whether anyone intended it or not.

That is why I think of culture as part of the operating system underneath strategy. Write the best strategy in the world, but it still has to execute through people. And people execute through the habits, incentives, relationships, and expectations they have learned will actually be rewarded. Change the strategy without changing those things, and old behaviors simply chase new goals.

Culture has to be built into how work gets done

At Abt Associates, I had several opportunities to work on culture deliberately — from serving on the corporate core team for an Organization Culture and Employee Satisfaction initiative to helping define and in later years redefine Abt's values to leading strategic transformation work within the international division. I also participated in cross-company efforts to strengthen integration and innovation and received Abt's inaugural Connectivity Award for contributions to cross-divisional collaboration.

Those experiences made me increasingly interested in the distance that can exist between saying an organization values something and creating the conditions in which people actually behave that way.

Collaboration is an obvious example. An organization can state repeatedly that it values collaboration. But how is work actually organized? Who owns the budget? Who gets credit for a win? Who controls access to a client? How are people evaluated? Does helping another team advance its work count as success, or is it effectively invisible?

If the systems reward people for protecting their own territory, collaboration will depend on individual goodwill. Some people will do it anyway. Many will not.

The same is true of transparency, innovation, inclusion, learning, and accountability. Culture becomes durable when those commitments are reinforced by the way the organization operates.

The First Team

I carried that lesson into how I built a leadership team at Pact. I called it a First Team: the Regional Managing Directors and technical Vice Presidents who reported to me, but who also needed to think of one another as their primary leadership team — not simply as representatives of their own regions, technical functions, or the teams they led.

The phrase mattered because it reframed the group as something to be built rather than assumed, and shifted the expectation from representing individual portfolios to sharing responsibility for the performance of the whole.

Scheduling the meeting didn't create that shift on its own. It depended on how we used it: what I asked people to weigh in on, what I chose not to decide alone, whether disagreement was genuinely welcome, and whether people came to see a colleague's problem as their own. Over time, those repeated behaviors did more to build a shared culture than any policy could have.

That is culture-building in practice. It is rarely one grand intervention. It is a set of choices reinforced consistently enough that they become normal.

Leaders teach culture every day

That puts a particular responsibility on leaders. Transparency is practiced, not announced. Accountability starts with the leader. Learning survives only when people can admit something did not work without concluding that honesty itself was the mistake. And challenge becomes normal only when people see someone disagree with the leader and remain respected afterward. None of that can be announced into existence.

Leaders teach culture every day through their reactions — what happens when someone disagrees, when a junior colleague catches something a senior colleague missed, when another team gets the credit, when results disappoint, when a high performer behaves badly.

People watch those moments closely, and the answers travel.

Start with an honest diagnosis

Deliberate culture-building therefore begins with an uncomfortable question: what are we actually rewarding now? Not what does the values statement say, but what would a close examination of promotions, recognition, resource allocation, decision-making, meeting behavior, and access to leadership reveal?

If the organization says it values teamwork but rewards individual competition, the reward system wins. If it says it values candor but difficult information consistently gets softened as it travels upward, people learn what candor really means. If it says people closest to the work should have a voice but important decisions are routinely made without them, people notice. If it says experimentation is valued but only successful experiments are celebrated, people learn not to experiment very boldly.

Culture is being taught either way. The value of diagnosing it honestly is that leaders can then decide whether what is being taught is what the organization actually needs.

One culture does not mean exact replication everywhere

This becomes more complicated in organizations operating across countries, languages, professions, and cultures. A global organizational culture cannot depend on proximity. Nor can it simply be the culture of headquarters exported outward.

It has to hold at a distance.

That requires consistency, but not rigidity. A behavior that reads as candor in one context may land differently in another. Expectations around hierarchy, disagreement, feedback, recognition, and decision-making vary considerably. Building a shared culture across those contexts requires being clear about what matters everywhere while remaining curious about how those commitments are expressed locally.

Transparency doesn't require every conversation to look the same, accountability doesn't require every office to organize itself identically, and collaboration doesn't mean eliminating disagreement. The strongest cultures I've seen tolerate — even invite — productive dissent. Collegiality isn't the same as agreement, and trust isn't the absence of conflict; it's the ability to work through disagreement without making the relationship itself the casualty.

The goal is not cultural uniformity. It is enough shared understanding that people can work across boundaries without having to renegotiate the organization's fundamental expectations every time they do.

Why culture is strategic

Strong cultures do more than improve engagement scores. They make organizations more capable. They help retain talented people because people are more likely to stay where they feel trusted, challenged, and connected to purpose. SHRM's global workplace culture research found that workers in positive organizational cultures were almost four times more likely to stay with their current employer; among employees who rated their culture as good or excellent, 15 percent said they were actively — or soon would be — looking for a new job, compared with 57 percent among those who rated their culture poorly.

Culture also affects risk. Ethical failures, safeguarding lapses, and compliance breakdowns frequently have a cultural dimension: an incentive that rewarded the wrong behavior, a norm that made looking away easier, a problem nobody felt safe enough to raise. LRN's 2024 Benchmark of Ethical Culture Report found that employees in strong ethical cultures were 1.5 times more likely to report misconduct when they observed it, and identified psychological safety as the strongest predictor of whether people spoke up at all.

That makes culture part of governance.

A policy can tell people what they are supposed to do. A control can establish a checkpoint. An audit can identify what has already happened. But every organization also depends on moments that no policy can fully script: whether someone asks another question, challenges an assumption, raises a concern, admits an error, or says something does not look right.

Culture influences what happens in those moments.

It also influences whether strategy crosses the distance between an executive team's intentions and thousands of individual decisions being made throughout an organization.

That is why culture cannot be treated as a side effect of good strategy. It is one of the means through which strategy becomes real.

Strategies change. Organizational structures change. Leaders change. What remains is what people have learned about how work gets done: what matters, what gets rewarded, whom they can trust, how they solve problems, and what is expected of them when no one has explicitly told them what to do.

Culture always emerges. The strategic question for leaders is whether we are deliberately building the culture our organizations need — or simply accepting the one that happens.