At some point in the last decade, "culture" became a deliverable. Organisations now launch culture initiatives the way they launch products — with kickoff meetings, workstreams, branding exercises, and town halls. There are culture surveys, culture dashboards, and culture transformation programmes with names that sound like software releases.
Most of them fail. Not because culture doesn't matter — it matters enormously — but because the way organisations approach it fundamentally misunderstands what culture actually is.
Culture is what people do when no one is managing them
Edgar Schein, whose work on organisational culture remains the most cited in the field, distinguished between three layers: artefacts (the visible stuff — office layouts, dress codes, stated values on the wall), espoused values (what the organisation says it believes), and basic underlying assumptions (what people actually believe and act on, often unconsciously).
The trouble with most culture programmes is that they operate exclusively at the first two layers. They redesign the artefacts and update the espoused values — new mission statements, refreshed company values, perhaps a set of leadership behaviours printed on lanyards. But the underlying assumptions — the ones that actually drive behaviour — remain untouched.
This is why culture change so often feels performative to the people living inside it. The posters change. The behaviours don't.
Why culture resists strategic intent
Recent research into digital transformation failures offers an instructive parallel. Studies examining why well-articulated digital strategies get overthrown in execution consistently find the same culprit: long-lived cultural assumptions that were never surfaced or addressed. Organisations attend to "culture readiness" in haste, then hand the problem to the strategy execution team — who discover, too late, that the culture they are working within has its own immune system.
The same dynamic plays out in leadership-driven culture change. A new CEO arrives with a vision for a more collaborative, innovative, accountability-driven culture. They communicate it clearly. They model it personally. And yet, twelve months later, the middle layer of the organisation is still operating on the assumptions that served the previous regime: avoid risk, protect your function, escalate decisions upward, don't surface problems unless you have a solution.
Culture does not change because leadership declares it. Culture changes when the systems, incentives, and daily management practices that reinforce the old assumptions are deliberately redesigned — and when the people who most influence those daily practices (middle managers, not executives) are equipped and motivated to behave differently.
What actually works
Diagnose before you prescribe. Most culture programmes skip this step entirely. They start with the desired end state ("we want to be more innovative / accountable / collaborative") and work backwards. The problem is that you cannot change what you haven't accurately described. A proper cultural diagnostic — one that goes beyond survey scores to surface the underlying assumptions and their origins — is the necessary first step. This requires skilled, candid conversations, not just questionnaires.
Focus on the management layer, not the executive layer. The research is unambiguous: 70% of the variance in employee engagement is attributable to management quality. Executives set the direction. Managers set the experience. If your culture change programme does not change how managers run their one-to-ones, make decisions, give feedback, and allocate their attention, it will not change the culture. Full stop.
Change the systems, not just the narrative. Culture is sustained by what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, what gets measured, and who gets promoted. If you say you value collaboration but promote individual heroes, the culture will remain individualistic regardless of how many workshops you run. Aligning the organisational infrastructure — performance management, recognition, promotion criteria, meeting structures, decision rights — with the desired culture is where the real work lives.
Accept that it takes longer than you think. Meaningful cultural shift in a mid-market organisation typically takes two to four years of sustained, deliberate effort. Not two quarters. Not one leadership offsite. Years. The organisations that succeed are the ones whose leaders have the patience and consistency to keep reinforcing the desired behaviours long after the initial energy of the "culture programme" has faded.
The leader's role
None of this means that executive leadership is irrelevant to culture change. It is essential — but not in the way most leaders assume. The executive's role is not to "create" the culture through force of personality or rhetoric. It is to create the conditions in which the desired culture can take root: clear priorities, aligned incentives, visible accountability, and — perhaps most importantly — personal behaviour that is consistent with the stated values even under pressure.
The last point is the hardest. Culture is shaped more by what leaders do under stress than by what they do when things are going well. A CEO who espouses psychological safety but publicly criticises a team member for raising a concern has just taught the entire organisation that the stated values are decorative.
Culture is not a project. It is the accumulated consequence of thousands of small decisions, made by hundreds of people, every day. Changing it requires changing those decisions — and that starts with understanding, honestly, what is driving them now.