When culture determines whether strategy succeeds
Executive summary
Insights from Danish top executives on culture as a business-critical leadership discipline
Most top executives agree on one thing: their organization’s culture is decisive for whether strategic ambitions are translated into tangible results. Nevertheless, culture is rarely treated as an actual leadership discipline on par with strategy, finance, and operations.
This white paper is based on interviews with top executives from the private and public sectors and examines how they work with organizational culture. The result is a nuanced picture of leaders who recognize the importance of culture, however, they are challenged to make culture work explicit, systematic, and fully embedded.
The study uncovers a number of significant paradoxes.
First, although culture is considered business‑critical, it plays a surprisingly limited role in the dialogue with boards, owners and political leaders. Many top executives want the freedom to shape the culture themselves and experience their boards lack the necessary language or competencies to contribute constructively to this conversation. The consequence in many organizations is that culture becomes an individual leadership responsibility rather than a shared strategic concern.
Second, the interviews show that culture work often falls into one of three categories: Some work with culture through explicit campaigns, branding and other visible initiatives. Others work primarily implicitly, where the culture is carried by the top executive’s own behavior and feedback. And only a smaller number work with culture as an integrated leadership discipline, where culture is systematically linked to strategy and leadership development.
A third paradox concerns the measurement of organizational culture. Many top executives do not have experience with culture being measurable. Therefore, their assessments of culture are often based on intuition, observations and lagging indicators such as employee well-being, sick days, absenteeism, customer satisfaction, etc.
These measurements primarily indicate something about the consequences of culture, not about the behavioral patterns that drive the results. As a result, organizations lose the opportunity to work proactively with culture as a strategic lever.
The interviews also point to the middle management layer as one of the greatest challenges in working with culture. Many top executives experience that it is precisely the middle managers who determine whether culture and strategy are translated into day-to-day practices among employees. The white paper raises the question of whether organizations too often conclude that cultural change requires replacing leaders, rather than investing sufficiently in developing new capabilities and mindsets among existing leaders.
Across all the interviews, a clear picture emerges: culture is not a supplement to strategy. Culture is the context in which strategy either succeeds or fails. When culture and strategy support each other, an organization’s ability to create results is strengthened. When they pull in different directions, even the best strategies become difficult to realize.
The white paper concludes with Conscious Consulting’s perspective on culture as a strategic leadership discipline and points to three central areas of development for organizations that want to strengthen the connection between culture, leadership and results:
Making culture a clear strategic lever
Creating individual ownership through leadership development
Establishing a shared organizational language and a systematic embedding of the desired culture
For organizations that wish to strengthen their ability to navigate a world characterized by increasing complexity, change, and demands for collaboration, the question is no longer whether culture is important. The question is how culture can be regarded with the same seriousness and systematic approach as the organization’s other strategic priorities.
Would you like to receive the full white paper? Reach out to us at contact@conscious-consulting.dk