Why Culture Change Fails and How to Fit It

Missing the Target? Why Culture Change Fails—and How to Get It Right
Are you aiming for culture change and coming up short time after time? You’re not alone. Organizational change of any kind is hard — but culture change is especially challenging because it requires shifting how people think, behave, and work together every day. The key is to understand why most culture change efforts fail and how to approach them differently.

Why Culture Matters
We define an organization’s culture as the shared values, beliefs, and attitudes that guide how and why work gets done. It’s the unwritten code that drives decisions, collaboration, and performance. And it has measurable business impact.

• Our organizational alignment research found that workplace culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high- and low-performing companies.
  
  
• According to Deloitte, 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a powerful company culture is vital to business success.

In short, culture isn’t a “soft” issue — it’s a strategic lever for performance.

Why Most Culture Change Efforts Miss the Mark
Many leaders underestimate the interdependence between culture and strategy. Culture and strategy are two sides of the same coin: the WHAT of strategy must align with the HOW of culture. When they don’t, even the best strategy will stall.

Our change management simulation data confirms that successful culture change requires two critical capabilities:

1. Linking desired cultural behaviors directly to strategic goals.
2. Reinforcing those behaviors with long-term systems, structures, and processes.

Without this connection, culture change remains an abstract aspiration rather than a practical performance driver.

How to Turn Culture Change Failure into Success
Once your organizational strategy is clearly defined, you can lay the foundation for lasting cultural transformation. Here’s how:

1. Establish Clear Team Goals
   Strategic clarity is the first step. Yet 95% of line managers say they don’t fully understand their company’s strategy. That lack of clarity trickles down — employees often find the strategy 50% less clear than their leaders believe.
   
   Every team should align on the top few strategic priorities (“the WHAT”) before discussing how to deliver them (“the HOW”). Remember, strategic communication does not equal strategic understanding or commitment. Clarity drives strategic believability and confidence.
   
   
2. Identify the Culture You Need to Succeed
   Once team goals and accountabilities are clear, assess where your current culture stands — and where it needs to be. This requires open, specific discussions about what must change or solidify to achieve team goals (e.g., approaches, processes, business practices, communications, behaviors, mindsets, tools, skills, infrastructure, etc.).
   
   Specificity transforms cultural aspiration into actionable behavior.  For example, if greater innovation is required, define observable behaviors such as:
   
   
   • Exploring fresh approaches to improve results
   • Demonstrating inventiveness in tackling complex problems
   • Generating new ideas to enhance processes or outcomes
     
     
3. Leverage Enablers and Overcome Inhibitors
   Next, pinpoint the top cultural enablers and inhibitors that influence change. Purposefully reinforce the enablers — such as transparent communication, strong leadership, or effective collaboration — and address the inhibitors that hold progress back, including misaligned incentives, unclear decision rights, or outdated processes.
   
   Sustainable change happens when systems, rewards, and leadership messages reinforce the desired culture every day.

The Bottom Line
Culture change may be difficult, but it’s far from impossible. Success comes from aligning culture with strategy, defining clear behavioral expectations, and building systems that make the right actions easy and rewarding. The question isn’t whether your culture can change — it’s whether you’re changing it with intention and alignment.

To learn more about why culture change fails, download The Top 7 Field-Tested Do’s and Don’t of Changing Corporate Culture