Culture for execution

Your strategy determines the culture you need. Most organisations describe the culture they want without ever asking whether it matches the strategy they have committed to. If you have not deliberately designed both, they have formed by default.

I was part of a leadership team that launched a new strategy in a deeply siloed organisation. We knew the way of working had to change, so we went straight to the systems and processes we thought would drive it: performance measures, team structures, decision rights. It took years, and some of it worked. But we never intentionally designed the culture that would enable the strategy. We focused on the mechanics and assumed culture would follow. It did not.

What I have learned since, through this work and through my research, is that even when organisations do design culture, most focus on the cognitive side: values, behaviours and systems. What rarely gets addressed is the emotional culture, meaning what you want people to feel and not feel for the strategy to land.

In our case people were carrying the fear of losing relevance and the anxiety of being measured differently. What we never harnessed was the excitement of being part of something bigger, the pride in building something new, the energy that comes from working in ways that actually matter.

Most culture work starts with values and stops at behaviours, because the emotional layer is the uncomfortable one to name out loud. But emotions drive behaviours, behaviours drive culture, and culture drives performance. A team that feels trust collaborates. A team that feels fear protects. You do not need to mandate the behaviour if you design the emotional conditions that produce it.

Most organisations need a blend rather than one type. Ambitious cultures suit market growth and aggressive targets. Collaborative suits cross-functional delivery and service. Adaptive suits transformation and sustained delivery through uncertainty. Disciplined suits operational excellence, compliance and safety-critical work.

Every organisation runs on rules about how execution happens. Some are written down: approval thresholds, governance gates, who signs off on what. Most are not. How fast decisions really get made. How bad news travels. Whether the hard thing gets said in the room or in the corridor afterwards.

The written ones are easy to find and easy to change. The unwritten ones decide whether anything moves, because execution is not the plan on the page. It is the everyday decisions people make about what is safe to do here. Change the strategy all you like. Nothing shifts until the unwritten rules do.

If you have followed this series you will have seen the same pattern across every lever. Governance that escalates by default. Ownership that lives on paper. Performance still rewarding what the last strategy needed. Different problems on the surface, the same unwritten rules underneath.

One leader in my research described it like this: it constipates decision-making, everything has to go up the chain, everything is an escalation, no one can make a decision, which means forward momentum is concentrated in the hand of that authority.

Some of that is written down. But escalating a decision that is already yours to make is written nowhere. People do it because nobody wants to be the one who acted alone. That is what makes norms so hard to shift. The written rule you can see, so it gets fixed. The norm you cannot, so it survives the fix, until someone names it.

Your crisis response proves your people can operate differently. The question worth asking is why those norms only show up when everything is at stake.

You know the meeting. The proposal is presented. The leader asks if there are any concerns. Silence. The plan gets approved, everyone leaves, and the real conversation starts in the corridor. That is never going to work. Did anyone else think the timeline was unrealistic? I was not going to be the one to say it.

Societal culture plays a bigger role in execution than most organisations realise, and this pattern runs through Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to varying degrees. Broadly we value directness in theory and default to politeness in practice. Challenge gets interpreted as confrontation, disagreement gets confused with disrespect, and flawed plans get approved because nobody is willing to be the person who pushes back.

My research found that 73 per cent of senior leaders believed avoidance behaviours were having a high to extremely high impact on execution in their businesses. Not because people lacked opinions, but because the culture had taught them it was safer to stay quiet.

Most organisations sit in one of two places. Either people feel safe but nothing gets challenged, so meetings end in false agreement and plans sail through unchecked. Or people do challenge, but it depends on personality and power, the loudest voice wins, and everyone else learns to stay silent. Neither delivers execution.

The zone that does is where safety and challenge are both present, and designed together rather than sequenced. One organisation in my research built a shared phrase that gave people a way in: I want to challenge you constructively. It sounds small. It gave people language to cross the gap between silence and confrontation without it becoming personal.

When challenge depends on courage, it is a lottery. When it is designed into the system, it becomes a norm.

You say collaboration, and you incentivise the lone wolf, so cross-functional delivery breaks. You say innovation, and you punish failure, so people stop raising risks early. You say accountability, and you protect the senior leader who does not deliver, so commitment erodes at every level beneath them. You say customer first, and you open every meeting with financials, so decisions start serving the numbers.

Every one of those is a reinforcement signal, and your people read all of them. They follow the signal, not the strategy.

This is where execution quietly breaks down. The plan and the governance are rarely the problem. The gap between what you design and what you do is.

There are two types of reinforcement. Formal reinforcement is reward, recognition, performance management, promotion, hiring and onboarding, and those are the ones you design. Informal reinforcement is where leaders spend their time, how they respond to bad news, what gets discussed first on Monday morning, the stories that get retold, and what quietly gets tolerated.

The informal signals were never designed. They formed through habit and history, and they are louder than any values statement. One respondent in my research said it plainly: collectivism was encouraged but not rewarded, we could not move the strategy forward in silos. The strategy said one thing, the system said another, people followed the system, and execution stalled.

The formal signals are easy to audit. The informal ones are the ones people actually read, and nobody wrote them.

Alignment says everyone should think and act the same way. Coherence says something narrower and harder: there is a small set of norms you cannot afford variance on, and everything else is free to look completely different.

Some consultants will sell you cultural alignment. For execution, what you need is coherence, and they are not the same thing.

Finance runs on precision and control. Sales runs on speed and relationships. Operations runs on whatever keeps the lights on today. Aligning them would mean flattening what makes each of them good at their job. Nobody actually wants that, and it is not what execution needs anyway.

What execution needs is narrower. A commitment made in one part of the business has to count in every part of it. Pace has to hold wherever one team's deadline depends on another. Risk has to travel to whoever needs to hear it, rather than staying wherever it is comfortable. That is the core, and it is small on purpose.

Everything else can stay exactly as different as it already is. How fast a team decides internally, how it prefers to express challenge, none of that needs to match. What cannot differ is whether two teams can disagree at a boundary and resolve it themselves without escalating. That is not fragmentation. That is coherence doing its job.

Get this wrong and you will not see it in an engagement score. You will see it in the handover that stalled, and in the commitment that quietly stopped counting the moment it crossed a boundary.

Most culture work goes wide when it should go narrow. Naming the few norms you cannot afford variance on, and leaving everything else alone, is more useful than a values statement everyone agrees with and nobody can act on.