The CEO’s Role in Aligning Corporate Culture

CEO’s Role in Aligning Corporate Culture is Growing
Today, a CEO’s influence on corporate culture is more critical than ever. Beyond setting strategic direction, the CEO holds ultimate accountability for the company’s success — the proverbial place where “the buck stops.”

Yet many leaders underestimate just how pivotal the CEO’s role is in shaping the cultural forces that drive — or undermine — strategic execution. A company’s culture is not a fluffy HR backdrop; it is a powerful engine that can accelerate performance when aligned with strategy or create friction that stalls progress. CEOs who actively shape and align culture are not just guiding behavior — they are influencing the very conditions that determine whether their strategy AND their people will thrive.

What is Corporate Culture?
Corporate culture is essentially how work gets done every day. It encompasses the shared beliefs, behaviors, and shared business practices that guide how employees think, act, and collaborate. Culture includes both the explicit values communicated across the organization and the unspoken assumptions that influence critical decisions — particularly around who gets hired, promoted, or let go.

While a company’s culture often originates with its founder, it naturally evolves over time. The CEO, as the organization’s most visible leader, holds a unique platform to actively shape and reinforce a culture that can either accelerate success or create barriers to achieving strategic goals.

A Successful Workplace Culture
Research from Harvard Business School shows that a strong, effective culture can explain up to half of the performance differences between organizations operating in the same industry. Similarly, our own studies on organizational alignment reveal that cultural factors account for 40% of the gap between high- and low-growth companies in terms of:

• Revenue growth
• Profitability
• Customer loyalty
• Leadership effectiveness
• Employee engagement

It’s hard to imagine a more powerful incentive for CEOs to prioritize getting culture right.

The CEO’s Role in Aligning Corporate Culture

Understanding the importance of a CEO’s role in aligning corporate culture, our organizational culture assessment data highlights four key actions you can take to shape a culture that actively drives your strategy:

1. Create Strategic Clarity
   High-performing CEOs make certain that every employee — not just senior leaders — can clearly articulate the company’s strategy and understand their individual role in advancing it. They dedicate the time to gather input from key stakeholders, facilitate strategic retreats, and refine the plan until it represents a winning formula for success.

   Research shows that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the performance gap between high- and low-performing CEOs.

   The question is: Is your strategy clear enough to drive results?

2. Define the Culture Needed to Execute Your Strategy
   If your strategy defines the “what,” your culture defines the “how.” Once your strategy is actionable, the executive team must identify and prioritize the few critical cultural shifts that will accelerate its execution.  Our research highlights ten cultural dimensions that capture the cultural attributes most closely linked to strategic alignment.

   High-performing leadership teams actively shape these dimensions to ensure their culture drives the business strategy to its full potential.

   The question is: Have you defined the ways of working required to set your strategy up for success?

3. Measure Your Current Culture
   After clarifying your strategy and defining the culture required to execute it, the next step is to understand your organization’s current cultural reality. This means assessing culture through the eyes of employees — across all levels — using a comprehensive organization-wide survey. By benchmarking key dimensions of organizational health and strategy-culture alignment, you can identify where you stand today and pinpoint the most critical gaps to address in order to accelerate strategic execution.

   The question is: Do you know what culture gaps need to be addressed most?

4. Close the Culture Gaps
   Once cultural priorities are clear, the CEO’s role is to ensure that actionable, practical plans are developed, executed, and rigorously monitored. Closing these gaps aligns the organization’s culture with strategic priorities, transforming intent into measurable results and creating the conditions for sustainable success.

   The question is: Do you have a plan in place to make it happen?

The Bottom Line
Strategy only delivers results when it passes through culture. High-performing leaders recognize that the CEO’s role in aligning corporate culture is a primary lever for achieving peak organizational performance. CEOs set the course for what matters most and define how work gets done. The critical question is: Are your leaders stepping up to lead culture with the same rigor as strategy?

To learn more, download Do You have a High Performance Organizational Culture to Drive Your Strategy?

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.