Organisational culture and leadership alignment are not separate from strategy; they are the conditions that determine whether strategy execution will fail or prevail. On this page, I explore how leaders can make culture visible, align their own behaviours with declared intentions and create the conditions for strategy execution to be successful, practical and sustained.
“We are part of systems that condition us.” – Fran Cherny, Be The Change
What is organisational culture, really?
Organisational culture is often treated as if it were a climate, a mood, or a set of words that people either like or dislike. It’s many times associated with engagement. In practice, culture is different and above all these.
Culture is the system of messages (conscious or unconscious)that tells people what is expected from them to be successful around here. Is built through what is rewarded, what is tolerated and what is risky or safe inside an organisation. It is the message people receive when they observe who is promoted, which behaviours are excused, what leaders spend time on, which customers are listened to, and which promises are delivered and which ones are not and how.
This is why classic organisational culture models remain useful. Edgar Schein’s work on organisational culture, for example, helps leaders distinguish between visible artefacts, stated values and deeper assumptions. The contribution I try to make is to bring this and other theories from great authors into the lived reality of leaders and teams: culture is not only something we diagnose; it is something we create every day through the way we decide, speak, reward, listen and act.
Why does leadership alignment matter for culture change?
Leadership alignment is not the same as leadership agreement. Agreement can be polite, conceptual and fragile. Alignment becomes visible when leaders act coherently and hold each other accountable, mainly when there is a cost we need to pay to make the change happen. It shows up when the team chooses the same principle in front of a difficult customer decision, a trade-off between short-term profit and long-term trust, a promotion decision, a conflict between regions, or a conversation that everyone knows must happen but nobody wants to initiate.
This is one of the reasons culture change fails so often. Leaders may agree on the language of the desired culture, but not yet on the behaviours that will prove it. They say they want accountability, but each person means something slightly different. They say they want innovation, but they have not agreed what level of risk is acceptable. They say they want customer centricity, but they have not aligned on what happens when a customer needs conflicts with an internal metric.
For senior leaders, the implication is uncomfortable and liberating at the same time. The organisation will not believe the culture we describe until it sees the leadership team paying the price of change Leadership alignment is therefore not a workshop outcome. It is the repeated discipline of making visible commitments, testing them in real situations and correcting course when behaviour drifts away from intention.
How do strategy, culture and execution reinforce each other?
A strategy describes where an organisation wants to go. Culture determines what people believe is actually possible, safe and rewarded on the way there. Execution is the visible result of the two interacting every day. When strategy, culture and execution reinforce each other, leaders do not need to push every decision manually because the system itself begins to guide behaviour. When they are misaligned, the organisation consumes enormous energy explaining, escalating, defending and correcting each other instead of creating the change needed.
This is why culture should not be treated as a “soft” complement to strategy. Culture decides whether the strategy can survive contact with reality. A company may declare that it wants to move faster, but if its approval mechanisms are designed for fear and control, speed will remain an aspiration. It may say it wants collaboration, but if incentives reward individual optimisation, collaboration will become a slogan. It may promise customer centricity, but if the people closest to customers have no authority to act, the promise will lose credibility.
Large organisations increasingly understand this connection. In my work as a consultant to cultural transformation and leadership development in global organizations I often describe it as the virtuous spiral of effectiveness: Strategy, Culture and Execution. This is a useful framework because it avoids treating culture as a campaign. Culture becomes the living bridge between what the organisation says it wants and how to create the conditions for people to act in alignment with it.
Why do transformation efforts create antibodies?
Every organisation has a memory. People remember the previous transformation, the old values campaign, the leadership announcement that was never followed by real decisions, the promise of empowerment that ended with more approvals, the conversation about trust that did not survive the next crisis. These memories matter because they shape how people interpret every new initiative.
When leaders repeatedly announce change without changing the signals around people, the organisation develops antibodies. People learn to wait. They listen politely, but they do not invest their full energy. They protect themselves from disappointment. They continue to do what has worked so far because the new behaviour has not yet become safer, clearer or more rewarded than the old one.
This does not mean people are cynical by nature. It means the system has trained them. The serious work of transformation is therefore not only to describe the future, but also to understand the past. What did people learn from previous attempts? Where was trust weakened? Which contradictions became part of the culture? Which behaviours were rewarded while the official language said something else? Leaders who ignore this history often interpret caution as resistance. Leaders who are willing to understand the stories behind can begin to rebuild credibility.
What role do conversations play in leadership alignment?
Organisations are made of conversations. Strategy is clarified in conversations. Trust is built or damaged in conversations. Commitments are created, renegotiated or broken in conversations. Culture changes when the quality of these conversations changes consistently enough to become a new standard that helps us make decisions and execute at our best..
This connects with research into team effectiveness, including Google re:Work’s Project Aristotle material, which identifies psychological safety as a key condition for teams to take interpersonal risks. For executives, the point is not to turn every meeting into a team building session. The point is to create the conditions where the opinions and feelings can appear early enough to be useful for our discussions about our products, customers and how we work together for them. When people cannot say what they see, the organisation loses contact with a world that is complex and with many different perspectives.
The leadership question is not only “What do we need to decide?” but also “What kind of conversation would allow us to decide well?” That requires connection before content, enough context before conclusions, and a shared commitment to learning rather than simply winning the argument. It sounds simple. In many executive teams, it is one of the hardest disciplines to practise.
How can leaders begin without reducing culture to a slogan?
The most useful starting point is to choose one strategic priority and ask what culture it requires. Not in abstract terms, but in behavioural terms. If the organisation needs to become more customer-centred, what must leaders do differently next week? What decisions must be made closer to the customer? What meetings need different information? What incentives currently contradict the promise? What stories will people tell if the shift happens?
From there, leaders can map the signals that support the desired culture and the signals that weaken it. They can identify the conversations that must happen, the systems that must be redesigned, the symbols that need to be reinforced, and the behaviours they themselves must model with consistency. This is not glamorous work. It is often slower than announcing a new framework. But it is the work that makes culture credible and sustainable.
For me, this work is not separate from the human challenge of leadership. To lead culture is to participate in the change of oneself. To align a system, leaders must first look at how they are contributing to its current logic. That is not a reason for guilt. It is a path to responsibility and growth.
Conclusion: what culture are we really creating?
Organisational culture and leadership alignment are not side topics. They are the conditions that determine whether strategy is delivered at its best, whether transformation becomes “second nature”and whether people can bring their best energy and experiences to the challenges ahead. The work begins when leaders stop asking only how to change others and begin asking what systems, symbols and behaviours they need to change to send the right messages to people.
If you are leading a team, a function or an organisation, be ready to ask yourself: what messages are we sending for people to do what they do? What messages do we need to send for people to “do the right thing”? I would love to hear where you see the biggest gap between declared culture and lived behaviour in organisations today.
If you want to learn more about Organisational Culture and Leadership Alignment
This view connects directly with what I explore in Be The Change, where the individual challenge of becoming our own innovation project expands into the cultural challenge of understanding the systems to which we belong.
It also connects with the work we do at Axialent and in other projects, where the human side of business transformation is approached through leadership, behaviour, mindsets and work culture.
The essential idea is simple, but demanding: people do not change in isolation. They change inside systems that are constantly teaching them what to do.
Explore the series: Organisational Culture and Leadership Alignment
Culture does not change through one idea, one workshop or one leadership message. It changes when we understand the different layers that shape how people think, decide and behave inside a system.
In this series, I explore four connected dimensions of organisational culture and leadership alignment:
1. Organisational Culture: Why Change Resistance Happens
Why people are not always resisting change, but often responding to what they think will make them succesful around here
Read the article → Coming soon
2. Culture Change: How Systems and Symbols Shape Behaviour
How everyday signals, systems, stories and symbols shape what people believe is expected.
Read the article → Coming soon
3. Organisational Design: How Context Shapes Behaviour
Why leaders cannot ask for new behaviours while keeping people inside a context designed for the old ones.
Read the article → Coming soon
4. Leadership Alignment: How Purpose Becomes Action
How senior teams turn purpose into credible behaviour, decisions and cultural signals.
Read the article → Coming soon
FAQ
Organisational culture is the system of messages, behaviours, and symbols that teaches people what is expected from them to fit in and succeed.
Leadership alignment matters because culture becomes credible when leaders act consistently with the behaviours and trade-offs they ask from everyone in the organisation.
Strategy defines direction, while culture shapes the behaviours and decisions that make that direction possible in daily execution.
Leaders can start by making current cultural signals visible, identifying contradictions and changing in a focused and consistent way 3 meaningful behaviours, systems and symbols, interconnected between them, that shape how people work together.