Every Organisation Has a Culture. But Is It the One You Need?

Every organisation has a culture. It's in the norms, behaviours and (usually) unwritten rules that shape how people work together, make decisions and get things done – every day.

The question is: do you have the culture you need?

Does it help you execute your strategy? Achieve your goals? Bring out the best in your people? Adapt, innovate and grow? Does it create the conditions for both people and business to thrive?

You'd think those would be fairly obvious things to aim for. And yet, every day, intelligent, well-intentioned leaders make decisions that unintentionally create the opposite.

Most leaders I meet care deeply. They want their organisations to perform. They want engaged people, innovation, collaboration, accountability, trust and growth.

So when an organisation struggles, in my experience the challenge is rarely intention. More often, it's a lack of attention. Attention to all the ways culture is constantly being shaped, without anyone consciously shaping it.

I have written and talked a lot about leaders' impact on culture, and how every day, often unconsciously, they shape culture through their actions, behaviours and priorities.

A less discussed, but equally impactful, shaper of culture is the way many organisations look at themselves as a collection of pieces rather than as a whole. The strategy team strategises. HR looks at engagement and wellbeing. Communications works on communication. Someone is driving a collaboration initiative. Leadership teams are busy managing, while leadership development tends to get outsourced. And somewhere in all of this, someone is responsible for "culture."

In a way, it makes sense. Organisations are complex, and breaking them into manageable pieces makes them easier to handle.

The trouble is that people don't experience an organisation in pieces. They experience the whole thing.

When the culture gets in the way

I once worked with an organisation that couldn't understand why, after hiring so many brilliant engineers, they still weren't developing better or more innovative products any faster than before.

On paper, it didn't make much sense. They had the talent and expertise, with smart people working on every part of the product.

But when we looked a few levels deeper, a different picture emerged.

Information wasn't flowing freely between teams. People held on to knowledge and ideas weren't shared as openly as they could have been.

There was some unhealthy competition between teams, but also something more human underneath it. People were afraid of becoming less relevant, or even redundant, if they shared too much of what they knew. They were also reluctant to admit mistakes because doing so might expose weakness. And that fear hadn't appeared out of nowhere. They had noticed that management often rewarded playing it safe more than experimenting with something new.

Gradually, small islands of very clever people, who had learned to play it safe, had formed. Each team was doing good work within its own world, but there was little real innovation and not nearly enough collaboration across the organisation.

The result was rather telling.

They were creating products made up of many brilliant parts that didn't fit particularly well together, held back by unspoken rules that management didn't even know they had written.

They didn't have a talent problem.

Was it a trust problem? A collaboration problem? An identity problem? A leadership problem?

Yes.

There were elements of all four.

They wanted innovation, but had unintentionally created an environment where playing it safe made more sense.

Hiring brilliant people doesn't automatically create a brilliant organisation. What happens between those people matters just as much as what each of them brings individually.

Culture is a living system

Culture isn't an event, an initiative or a project with a deadline. It's a living, interconnected system that shapes how things actually get done.

An organisation may be divided into functions, departments and teams, each with its own responsibilities, priorities and goals. But culture lives in the connections between them too. In how information flows. How decisions get made. Whether people look beyond the interests of their own team. And perhaps most importantly, whether they genuinely see themselves as part of something bigger, collectively responsible for the success of the whole organisation.

That's why looking at any one piece in isolation can only tell us so much.

And there are very real business consequences when purpose, strategy and culture either work together – or don't.

Research from Stanford and Culture Partners found that organisations fully aligned on purpose, strategy and culture averaged a 44.5% increase in revenue growth over three years.

In other words, how well the pieces work together matters. A lot.

So how do we see the whole?

That question is one of the reasons my team and I developed the Corporate Spring Model™.

Drawing on years of working with organisations, studying the research and, perhaps most importantly, watching what actually happens when humans come together to get things done, we wanted a way to make something as complex and intangible as culture easier to see and work with.

Not to reduce culture to a formula. Human beings are far too wonderfully complicated for that. But to give leaders a way to step back and look at the whole ecosystem.

The model looks at five interconnected building blocks: Purpose, Identity, Trust, Growth Mindsets, and Passion & Joy.

Purpose gives us a shared understanding of why we're here and where we're going. Identity is about who we are together. Trust determines whether people dare to speak honestly, challenge each other, share what they know and admit mistakes. Growth Mindsets shape how we learn, experiment and respond to challenges and change. And Passion & Joy are the energy in the system: the fuel that makes people want to create, contribute and make extraordinary things happen, and the spark that makes it fun along the way.

None of these building blocks exists in a vacuum. They are brought to life throughout the organisation through the model's three drivers: Leadership, Communication and Collaboration, all continuously influencing one another.

Think back to those engineers. The purpose wasn't strong enough to pull the separate teams together. Identity influenced whether people saw themselves as members of separate teams or collectively responsible for creating a great product. Trust affected whether knowledge was shared. Their response to mistakes affected learning. Communication and collaboration determined whether knowledge travelled, while leadership shaped which behaviours were rewarded and reinforced. And with so much energy going into staying safe, there wasn't much left for passion or joy.

Suddenly, what looked like a product-development problem looks rather different.

Culture isn't something you roll out

Every organisation has a culture.

It has grown through its history, its founders, its successes and failures, the people it has hired, the leaders it has promoted, the stories people tell and thousands of tiny decisions made every day.

Some of it may be exactly what you need for the next chapter. Some of it may have made you enormously successful in the past and now be getting in your way. And some of it may simply have emerged without anyone ever deciding that this was how things should be.

So shaping culture intentionally doesn't mean wiping the slate clean and designing the perfect workplace.

It starts with curiosity.

What is actually happening here? What gives this organisation energy? What are people proud of? What should never be lost? Where does energy get stuck? What behaviours help the strategy, and which quietly undermine it? What do leaders say matters, and what does the organisation learn from what they actually do?

Those are much more relevant questions than: "How do we fix our culture?" Because sometimes there is nothing to fix. There may be something to understand, protect, strengthen or evolve.

Perhaps every once in a while, we simply need to zoom out. To see the connections between the things we have become so good at managing individually, and remember that people experience them as a whole. And to realise that culture, with all its living, interconnected parts, shapes how everything else actually works.

Which makes me wonder: What do you think would happen if you shaped your company culture as intentionally as you shape your business strategy?

Maybe it's worth finding out.