What Most Leaders Get Wrong About Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Maybe accounting and legal for lunch. I’ve never actually heard anyone try and complete that quote. And I’ve never really figured out why any leader would want strategy masticated by anything. Let alone culture.

However, the idea behind the quote is that culture is paramount. The success or failure of an organization or team depends upon its culture—the norms and behaviors around how employees communicate and collaborate.

Most leaders agree that culture is hugely important. But that seems to be where the agreement stops. Many leaders disagree over exactly what culture is, why it is so important, or even what a healthy organizational culture looks like.

In this article, we’ll cover the key assumptions most leaders get wrong about culture.

Culture Is Unique

The first assumption leaders get wrong about culture is that their culture is unique. Most leaders describe how unique and special their culture is and then proceed to tell you about how great the people are, how supportive of each other the teams are, or how great the benefits are. See where this is going? 

Most positive company cultures aren’t actually all that unique. While toxic company cultures could be toxic for a variety of reasons, healthy company cultures have a LOT in common.

That’s good news. The lack of uniqueness means that building a strong company culture requires merely following the pattern. It means that leaders put a unique spin on a trusted model of healthy culture. 

The research suggests that the model looks like this: most healthy cultures are marked by common understanding, psychological safety, and prosocial purpose. They may use different terms and may use different stories to highlight those elements. 

However, few organizations build thriving cultures without teams that understand and collaborate well through psychological safety toward the purpose of helping others.

Don’t try to reinvent a new company culture; reinvent how you’re applying those fundamentals.

Culture Is About Artifacts

The second assumption leaders get wrong about culture is that it’s about artifacts. Ask what many leaders are doing to build culture, and they’ll describe things that can be easily seen. They’ll talk about the foosball table or the quarterly celebrations. 

They’ll point to the mural of core values that they commissioned a local graffiti artist to put in the lobby. However, researchers on organizational culture point out that these “artifacts” just scratch the surface and that underneath what you can see lie a set of espoused values and shared basic assumptions. Those values and basic assumptions matter a lot more when we’re building and shaping a culture.

Consider the tech company famous for its culture, which is often described using merely artifacts, such as Google. For most of its history, Google has been known for the cultural artifact of having free food readily available to any employee of the company—and chef-quality free food, too. 

But just providing free food won’t create a Google-like company culture. Because underneath Google’s policy is the idea that people from diverse departments connect and trade ideas around food—it’s why you’d be hard-pressed to find a table at Google with only one or two chairs. 

The food serves to implement the value of collaboration and the shared assumption that when diverse thinkers trade ideas, the result makes everyone better.

Don’t blindly copy artifacts that sound like they’ll build culture; understand the values to be emphasized and build artifacts that support them.

Culture Is About The Company

Another assumption leaders get wrong about culture is that it’s about the company. After all, it’s most commonly referred to as company culture or organizational culture, and most culture experts and researchers examine culture at the organizational level. 

But if you think about most people’s work experience, it’s shaped less by the culture of the entire organization and more by the culture of the team that they’re working on. 

We often hear the phrase, “People don’t quit bad companies; they quit bad bosses.” In other words, the boss they have or the team they’re on influences their feelings about the company much more than a statement of core values or benefits and perks.

A better way to consider culture in organizations is as a set of concentric circles. A companywide culture is like the outer ring, and depending on the size of the organization, different departments and functions serve as middle rings—with an individual team being the innermost ring of the culture. 

This means that senior leaders not only shape the overall culture but must also train leaders at all levels to pay attention to how their actions align with or misalign with that culture.

Don’t just declare the elements of your company culture and hope managers fall in line; give managers the means to build a strong yet supportive team culture on their own.

Unless leaders get the culture right, not a whole lot else goes right in the organization. While none of these assumptions will cause a culture to go toxic immediately, misunderstanding what a positive culture looks like and how it is built means leaving the eventual culture to chance.

By contrast, getting these elements of culture right means building an environment of common understanding, psychological safety, and a prosocial purpose that helps everyone do their best work ever.

Culture Is Dynamic

Many leaders make the mistake of looking at culture as something static. They don’t think it changes over time or in different situations. But culture is actually dynamic. It evolves with the organization and the changing trends.

Even the ever-changing needs of the Workforce become part of it. Then, technology, societal shifts, and market trends also play a role in shaping the culture. So, if the organization’s culture was initially agile and informal, as your company grows and there are more changes around, you’ll have to create a more structured and formalized process for the organization.

Culture should also be cohesive and bridge the gap in the operational needs of the people. Otherwise, it can lead to a massive disconnect and employee dissatisfaction. So, it’s the job of the leaders to treat culture as a living system that needs regular attention. 

Culture Starts With Leadership

Leaders have a very important role in setting the tone for the organizational culture. The way they behave, make decisions, and communicate with others sets the trend about what is valued and what is to be followed. Still, we can’t say that culture is the sole responsibility of the seniors. It is co-created by everyone who is part of the organization. 

Leaders must set the tone. This means they cannot just declare values or give speeches about them and expect others to follow those words.

They have to model those values in their actions. For instance, if we take psychological safety or accountability, the leaders have to admit their own mistakes and create a safe environment for others to share their ideas and take accountability for their actions without any fear. 

Wrap Up

Culture is, unfortunately, often misunderstood even by the top-rated leaders in the industry. However, the importance of culture in shaping an organization’s success cannot be undermined. 

Culture is not just on a surface level. It goes deep into the company’s core values. Culture creates a shared understanding between the team members and psychological safety, which is where the organizational goals and employee well-being are in line. 

Culture is also about aligning the timeless principle with the organization’s goals. As leaders, you must work on building a thriving workplace culture where innovation, collaboration, and communication are welcomed — so your culture becomes a strength that doesn’t eat but rather feeds the strategy.