There’s a famous saying about culture eating strategy for breakfast. While the provenance of the saying is up for debate, I have no doubt about its accuracy.

The surprising thing (for me personally) is how much I agree with it. I started off my career doing strategy. A long time ago, I believed insight and structured decision making was all that a company needed to kick ass. But I didn’t appreciate how important culture is – nor its power to override even the most well-thought out strategy. When you see enough recommendations get accepted but not well executed, you start to understand that something else is at play.

Look at the leadership

The difficulty of culture is how to manage it? It’s air: pervasive and invisible. How do you get a handle on it?

While management frameworks are a dime-a-dozen, some stand the test of time. For culture, my favourite is the Cultural Web. It’s essentially a list of things to get you started when thinking about culture. In a nutshell:

• Stories: what do people talk about?
• Rituals and routines: daily behaviours and actions
• Symbols: dress codes, office plushness, etc.
• Organisational structure: formal and informal
• Control systems: financial systems, quality systems, reward systems
• Power structures: people who are truly powerful

The nuance I would add to this is that leaders have a disproportionate impact on culture. Coming in cold into a new organisation? Take a look at the CEO. In a small org, the CEO influence is huge in every corner of the company. In a larger org, then also look at department heads and other managers to understand the culture in one corner vs another. The CEO influence is still there, but it will be dissipated by that of the local office manager, department head, etc.

In other words, as a more focused use of the Cultural Web, I would start by looking at the stories leaders tell (or are told about them), their rituals and routines and symbols. It’s a bit anthropological, but it starts to point to what is realistic or not with regards to executing a strategy.

Can you change culture without swapping out people?

What if you want to change culture? What if you look at an org and you say, “this is no longer right for us”?

The classic Cultural Web framework would say that you do an audit and gap analysis. “Where are you now? Where do you want to get to? What needs to change?” Simple? Bullshit.

Culture is so intimately tied into individuals in leadership positions that you can’t change it wholesale. You can nudge it, mature it, evolve it. But you can’t take it back to the store for an exchange. Anyone who has ever made the fallacy of wishing someone would change (e.g. a family member or a friend) knows that adults don’t really just become new people. So if you look at your culture and realise that it’s getting in the way of where you need to be as an org, I really believe that you have to change the people.

That’s a painful conclusion. But I’ve never seen a culture change otherwise.

The less painful (and perhaps more realistic) route here is to adapt the strategy to fit the culture. There are many ways to skin a cat. Or in other words, any given team will have strengths and weaknesses. They’ll be able to execute some strategies but not others.

An honest appraisal of what they can and can’t do during the formulation of the strategy should be the first move. Play the strengths of what you’ve got already. And if it’s clear that isn’t enough, then make the swap.

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GS Dun provides leadership for new ventures. Our name is short for “get sh** done”, so while we can talk the talk, we prefer to keep our meetings short and just get on with it.