Manage Your Company Culture: 4 Leadership Actions That Drive Performance

How to Manage Your Company Culture Before It Undermines Your Business Strategy

The ability to proactively manage your company culture matters.  Why? Because how work gets done is either accelerating your strategy or quietly sabotaging it. Which is happening in your organization?

Too many executives treat workplace culture as an HR initiative rather than a critical business performance lever. They invest heavily in:

• Strategic planning
• Leadership development
• Operational improvements.

— while overlooking the unwritten rules that determine how work actually gets done.

If you don’t intentionally manage your company culture, your culture will eventually manage you.

What Does It Mean to Manage Your Company Culture?
At LSA Global, we define company culture as HOW work gets done, compared with strategy, which defines WHAT an organization must accomplish.

Culture encompasses the shared beliefs, values, assumptions, and behaviors that influence everyday decisions. It determines:

• What gets rewarded and punished.
• What gets tolerated
• How employees respond when nobody is watching.

And when those behaviors conflict with your strategic priorities, even the best strategy can fail.

Why Managing Company Culture Is a Business Imperative
Our organizational alignment research found that cultural alignment accounts for 40% of the performance difference between high- and low-performing organizations, across measures including revenue growth, profitability, leadership effectiveness, employee engagement, and customer loyalty.

Similarly, Deloitte research found that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success.

These findings reinforce an essential leadership principle taught in our action learning leadership development programs: Culture is not separate from business performance. It helps determine business performance.

4 Steps to Manage Your Company Culture More Strategically

1. Define the Culture Your Strategy Actually Requires
   Stop asking whether your company has a good culture. Ask whether it has the right culture to execute your strategy.
   
   A company competing through innovation may require experimentation and decentralized decision-making. An organization competing through operational reliability may need business practices with greater standardization and disciplined execution.
   
   Neither approach is inherently superior.
   
   The question is whether your cultural expectations reinforce your strategic choices.
2. Expose the Gap Between Your Needed and Actual Culture
   Most organizations have two cultures: the one described in corporate presentations and the one employees experience daily.
   
   Assess your current workplace culture by examining:
   
   — Which behaviors actually get rewarded or tolerated?
   — Where do decisions become unnecessarily slow?
   — What prevents employees from challenging assumptions?
   — Which team norms undermine or accelerate strategic execution?
   
   The greatest cultural risks often hide in behaviors that leaders have learned to accept.
3. Change the Critical Few Behaviors That Matter Most
   Trying to transform everything simultaneously usually creates confusion, resistance, and change fatigue.
   
   Instead, identify the one or two cultural shifts with the greatest potential to improve strategic performance.
   
   For example, replacing functional silos with cross-functional accountability may accelerate execution more effectively than launching another values campaign.
   
   Involve employees in shaping these changes and equip managers to reinforce them through everyday decisions.
4. Reinforce Culture Through Leadership and Accountability
   Culture changes when leaders consistently demonstrate, reward, and reinforce the desired behaviors.
   
   Align information sharing, hiring, onboarding, promotions, performance management, recognition, decision-making, business practices, organizational structures, and leadership expectations with your target culture.
   
   Measure progress through observable behaviors and business outcomes — not employee sentiment alone.
   
   Remember: What leaders tolerate becomes culture. What they consistently reinforce becomes the standard.

The Bottom Line
To manage your company culture effectively, stop treating culture as an abstract collection of values and start managing it as a strategic business asset. Define the behaviors your strategy requires, confront the gaps between needed and actual practices, prioritize meaningful changes, and hold leaders accountable for modeling and reinforcing them. The goal isn’t to create a universally admired culture — it’s to build a healthy and purposefully aligned culture that enables your people to perform at their peak and execute your strategy.

To learn how to turn your workplace culture into a competitive advantage instead of a barrier to execution, download Is Your Company Culture Helping or Hurting Your Strategy? How to Build a Purposeful and Aligned Corporate Culture

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.