Most strategies do not ask people to do more of what they already do. They ask for faster decisions, stronger enterprise collaboration, sharper customer focus, greater innovation or more ownership. Each expectation sounds reasonable in a strategy document; the difficulty begins when the required behaviour collides with the habits and signals that built the organisation.

Consider a familiar pattern. A business tells managers that decisions should move closer to the customer and gives them greater authority, but when one considered decision produces an imperfect result, senior leaders take back control, add approvals and scrutinise the manager publicly. Within weeks, decisions begin travelling upwards again, leaving leaders to conclude that managers are not ready for ownership while managers conclude that authority is conditional on never being wrong.

No one has openly rejected the strategy, and the language of empowerment may still appear in every leadership communication. Yet the organisation has taught people a more credible lesson through experience: escalation is safer than ownership. This is how culture redirects strategy without ever formally opposing it.

Through my work in organisational development, I have often entered at the point where strategic direction has already been defined, and the organisation must translate it into the way people work. What I have repeatedly seen is that employees can understand the language of a strategy and agree with its intent while remaining surrounded by leadership practices, established norms and organisational systems that support a different way of behaving. When this happens, the problem is rarely visible as a direct rejection of strategy; it appears through delayed decisions, guarded conversations, functional protection and familiar patterns that persist despite a new direction.

Culture is the organisation’s evidence

Culture is often described through values, engagement or employee experience, but these are only partial views. In the context of strategy execution, culture is the set of shared rules people infer about how work really gets done: what is safe, what is rewarded, what is tolerated and what is likely to help someone succeed. Those rules are formed through repeated observation of leadership choices, consequences and daily operating routines.

This understanding is consistent with Schein and Schein’s (2017) view that culture operates not only through visible practices and stated values, but also through the underlying assumptions that people come to accept as true. These assumptions influence how employees interpret situations and decide what is expected of them, even when those expectations have never been formally stated.

Culture therefore becomes most visible when strategy gets difficult. In comfortable conditions, declared values and actual behaviour can appear aligned, but pressure reveals which commitments are real. The budget that is protected, the missed target that is excused, the challenge that is welcomed or punished and the person who is promoted all tell employees more than another communication campaign can.

The same principle applies to candour. An organisation may repeatedly invite employees to speak openly, but people form their judgement by watching how leaders respond when they hear something difficult. Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows that people are more willing to raise questions, concerns and mistakes when they believe that taking an interpersonal risk will not result in punishment or humiliation (Edmondson, 2019). The issue is not simply whether people have been asked to speak; it is what the organisation has taught them will happen when they do.

Yesterday’s strengths can become today’s constraints

Every organisation carries behaviours that once made sense. Centralised decisions may have created speed during an early phase of growth, strong functional ownership may have built technical depth, and tight controls may have protected quality. Because these practices produced results, they became associated with responsible leadership and eventually stopped feeling like choices at all.

Strategy, however, describes what the organisation must become next. A company may now need local decisions, shared accountability or faster experimentation, while its inherited culture continues to confer status on control, functional protection and certainty. The problem is not that the old culture was bad; it is that the organisation is still using an earlier definition of success to execute a different future.

A strong culture is not automatically the right culture. Its value depends on whether it supports the direction the organisation has chosen.

The evidence points to an execution problem

The gap between recognising culture and managing it has persisted for years. In a survey of 2,219 executives, managers and employees, 84% considered culture critical to business success, yet fewer than half believed their organisations managed it effectively. The same research found that only 54% of change initiatives were adopted and sustained (Aguirre et al., 2013). Recognition, in other words, had not translated into the organisational discipline required to make change hold.

Research from Heidrick & Struggles makes the connection to business direction more explicit. In a global survey of 500 CEOs, 82% said they had made culture a priority, but only a small group treated it as a leading driver of financial performance, linked it directly to strategy and worked intentionally to shape it. Companies led by this group reported a three-year revenue growth rate of 9.1%, compared with 4.4% among the other companies surveyed (Gailey et al., 2021).

This association does not prove that culture alone produced the difference, but it demonstrates that recognising culture as important is not the same as managing it in support of strategy. The relationship becomes even clearer when the strategy requires a particular organisational capability.

BCG found that companies with a strong innovation culture were 60% more likely to be innovation leaders. These organisations did not rely on aspiration alone; they identified the behaviours needed for innovation, activated them through leadership and embedded them in the operating model (Manly et al., 2023).

The relevance extends beyond innovation because it demonstrates a wider principle: culture creates strategic value when it is shaped around the behaviours required for a specific business outcome. These studies examine the problem from different perspectives, but together they make one point difficult to dismiss: strategy cannot be separated from the organisational environment in which people are expected to execute it.

Culture is one condition of performance

At Alaya, we view individual performance through four connected conditions. The model is deliberately multiplicative because a serious weakness in any one condition constrains the performance created by the others.

Performance = Clarity  × Capability  × Culture  ×  Systems
Σ Pi  =  Organisational Performance

• Clarity — what the strategy requires from the role and the choices it must shape.

• Capability — the knowledge, skills and tools needed to perform.

• Culture — the behaviours leaders model, encourage and consistently reinforce.

• Systems — the structures, processes, measures, incentives and decision rights that enable work.

The distinction between culture and systems is important. Systems formally define what is measured, rewarded, permitted and resourced; culture is the meaning people draw from how those systems are applied and from what leaders do when the formal rules become inconvenient. If collaboration appears in the values but promotions consistently favour leaders who protect functional territory, the organisation has made the real rule clear.

The second expression reflects Alaya’s belief that strategy becomes organisational performance through the contributions of the people responsible for executing it. This does not mean that people perform independently or that organisational performance is a simple headcount calculation. Coordination, interdependence, structure and collective ways of working shape individual contribution, and these conditions are carried through the organisation’s culture and systems.

What people hear and what they learn

A strategy can ask for innovation while approval processes continue to favor certainty, ask for enterprise thinking while targets and recognition remain entirely functional, or invite candor while senior leaders treat challenge as disloyalty. In each case, employees face a rational choice between the behaviour the organisation describes and the behaviour its evidence supports.

From a behavioural perspective, this matters because repeated consequences teach people what to expect. When the same counterproductive response appears across teams or levels, it should be treated as organisational evidence rather than a collection of individual shortcomings. The repetition suggests that something in the environment is enabling, rewarding, protecting or leaving the behaviour unresolved.

Diagnose the contradiction before choosing the intervention

Before refreshing values, repeating the strategy or commissioning another leadership workshop, leaders should identify the few behaviours on which execution genuinely depends. They should then examine what happens when people attempt those behaviours: how authority responds, which trade-offs are made, whose conduct is rewarded, what the performance system measures and which old behaviour remains safer or more advantageous.

The most revealing evidence is usually found in recurring moments rather than culture statements: a resource-allocation debate, a customer escalation, a cross-functional handoff, a failed experiment, a talent review or a quarter under pressure. Observing these moments helps leaders distinguish a capability gap from a cultural contradiction, and a cultural contradiction from a systems problem. That distinction matters because each demands a different response.

The useful first question is not, “Do we have the right culture?” It is, “What does our organisation currently teach people about how to succeed here—and is that lesson compatible with our strategy?”

From organisational intent to behaviour that holds

Culture cannot be delegated as an HR initiative because the strongest cultural signals come from line leadership, operating decisions and consequences. HR and organisational development can provide diagnosis, facilitation and discipline, but business leaders shape the lived culture each time they allocate resources, respond to challenge, review performance or decide what will be tolerated.

At Alaya, we begin by translating strategic intent into a small number of observable behaviours and then testing whether leadership routines, organisational systems and everyday consequences reinforce them. This turns culture from an abstract conversation about values into a practical examination of execution, while giving leaders a clearer place to start: identifying and removing the contradictions that make the old behaviour more credible than the new expectation.

Before questioning why people are not executing the strategy, leaders should pay attention to what their organisation is teaching them every day:

• What happens when someone takes ownership and the outcome is imperfect?

• What continues to be rewarded when collaboration conflicts with a functional target?

• How does authority respond when it is challenged?

• When the strategy demands new behaviour but established practice makes the old behaviour safer, which one is allowed to prevail?

This seldom happens through one defining moment. It becomes visible through everyday decisions, responses and trade-offs that gradually pull people back towards familiar ways of working. Over time, the organisation begins to reproduce the very past it says it wants to leave behind.

The real question is not only whether people understand the future being described, but whether their daily experience gives them enough reason to believe it.

REFERENCES

Aguirre, D., von Post, R., & Alpern, M. (2013). Culture’s role in enabling organizational change. Booz & Company.

Camp, A., Gast, A., Goldstein, D., & Weddle, B. (2024, February 12). Organizational health is still the key to long-term performance. McKinsey & Company.

Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.

Gailey, R., Johnston, I., & LeSueur, A. (2021, July 15). Aligning culture with the bottom line: How companies can accelerate progress. Heidrick & Struggles.

Litré, P., Michels, D., Walter, S., & Burke, M. (2018, June 13). Soul searching: True transformations start within. Bain & Company.

Manly, J., Harnoss, J., Schmitt, H. L., Werner, R., Blanchard, D., & Lovich, D. (2023, July 26). An innovation culture that gets results. Boston Consulting Group.

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.