Culture is experienced through operating decisions

A statement of values cannot compensate for an operating system that rewards conflicting behaviour.

I work with leaders to identify those contradictions in specific situations. Changing a decision right, a target or a management practice can be more meaningful than launching another communication campaign. The test is whether colleagues experience the intended difference in their work.

The gap between stated and lived culture persists because each contradiction looks reasonable on its own. A sales incentive rewards volume, a risk policy demands caution and a cost target discourages the time needed for collaboration. Every one of these was designed by a sensible person for a sensible purpose. Employees, however, experience them together, and they resolve the tension by watching what actually gets rewarded or tolerated. Leaders rarely see the combined effect, because they encounter each mechanism separately, in a different meeting, with a different sponsor.

When a leadership team asks me to help with culture, I begin by collecting a small number of recent decisions that colleagues talk about. These might be a promotion, a project that was cancelled, or a mistake that was handled well or badly. For each one we ask what message it sent, whether that message was intended and which mechanism produced it. The exercise is uncomfortable because it treats leaders' own choices as evidence. It is also far more productive than a survey score, because it points to something specific that can be changed.

Consider an organisation that says it values cross-functional collaboration while every manager is assessed only on the results of their own team. A colleague who spends a week helping another function solve a customer problem gains nothing in their review and may lose ground. The rational response is to stop helping. Introducing a shared objective for a few critical customer journeys, and asking managers to report on contributions beyond their unit, changes the calculation. No poster is required, and colleagues tend to notice the change within a single review cycle.

The usual counter-argument is that culture is too diffuse to be shaped through mechanisms, and that it depends instead on inspiring leadership and shared purpose. I agree that purpose matters and that leaders' personal example carries weight. But example is itself a series of operating decisions: whom a leader listens to, what they escalate and how they respond to bad news. Treating culture as a set of observable choices does not diminish its human dimension. It makes that dimension accountable, which is what employees are asking for when they question whether values are sincere.

For the leadership team, this means accepting that culture is part of their operating responsibilities rather than a programme delegated to the people function. Each executive should be able to name the decisions in their area that most shape behaviour and say whether those decisions reinforce or undermine the culture they describe. For the board, it means asking for evidence from operating practice, not only from engagement data. The useful discussion is about what was changed, who bore the cost of changing it and what colleagues have noticed since.

Culture work is most credible when leaders are willing to change something that inconveniences them: a meeting, an approval, a measure they are judged on. Colleagues notice those choices far more than any statement of values. The question I ask is which operating decision would make our stated culture easier to live.