Most companies say culture matters.
Very few really use their culture as a strategic advantage.
Not because leaders do not care, but because culture is often treated as something soft and separate from the ‘real’ work of strategy, performance and growth. In reality it is the opposite. Culture quietly decides how much of your strategy ever makes it off the slide and into real behaviour.
What do we mean by culture as a strategic asset?
Culture is not the values page on your website. It is the pattern of how things are actually done. It shows up in the trade-offs people make. Which behaviours get rewarded. What people believe it really takes to succeed at your organization.
From behavioral science to organizational theory to long-term performance research, leading thinkers like Dan Ariely, Edgar Schein and Jim Collins agree on one thing: when culture aligns what people value with how leaders act and how decisions are made, it becomes a strategic asset that drives motivation, execution and sustained outperformance.
If people care about the same things your strategy cares about. And they see leaders making decisions in line with that. You get more energy, better execution and stronger results over time. That is what turning culture into a strategic advantage looks like.
The alignment triangle: values, leadership, decisions
You can think of culture as a triangle that either works for you or against you.
What people value
What feels meaningful, fair and energizing in their daily work.
How leaders act
The behavior people actually observe. Especially under pressure.
How decisions are made
What gets funded, who gets promoted, what is tolerated and what is not.
When these three tell the same story, you get trust and momentum. When they tell different stories, you get cynicism and friction. However, many organizations invest heavily in one corner of the triangle. They run a values workshop. Or launch a leadership program. Or redesign the performance process.
The real advantage comes when you work on the connections between the three. That is where culture becomes an operating system instead of a poster.
Three common failures
I see the same three patterns in many organizations:
1. Poster values versus lived values
The official values say ‘collaboration’. The bonus structure rewards individual targets. Who gets promoted? The heroic individual who saves the quarter. People learn fast. The real value is not ‘collaboration’. It is ‘hit your number, even if it hurts the team’.
Result: internal competition, local optimization and lost potential.
2. Strategy that ignores culture
A new strategy arrives with impressive slides and strong logic. But it lands in an organization with a very different reality.
For example.
The strategy says ‘customer first’. The culture says ‘risk avoidance and internal approval first’.
The result is not resistance in the classic sense. It is slow progress, endless exceptions and a feeling that dogmas like, this is not how we work here.
3. Culture work not linked to performance
There are workshops, values cards and maybe even a culture survey. People enjoy the sessions. Then they go back to a system where everything stayed the same.
- No shifts in how priorities are set.
- No change in who gets promoted.
- No impact on how trade-offs are made when resources are tight.
People conclude that culture is optional. A side project without consequences or impact, not a strategic lever.
How to start turning culture into a strategic advantage?
Here are four practical moves that do not require a huge program, but can have real impact.
1. Surface the real culture, not the desired one. Start with the grass-roots reality. Not with the slide you wish were true.
You can ask:
- What behaviors really get rewarded here?
- What do new people learn in their first 90 days about how to succeed?
- Where do we consistently see friction or workarounds.
Listen especially to the stories people tell about ‘how things are done around here’. Those stories are your current culture in action.
2. Decide what must never change. Every organisation has a few non-negotiable strengths in its culture. Often they are overlooked because they feel ‘normal’ internally.
Your job as a leadership team is to name those strengths clearly.
For example:
We give direct feedback, respectfully.
We are biased for action in service of the customer.
Low ego, high standards.
Once you are clear on what must never change, you can design strategy and growth around it, instead of against it.
3. Translate values into concrete decision rules. Values only become strategic when they help people choose.
For each of your core values, ask:
- How does this value change the way we decide on priorities?
- How does it influence who we hire, promote and develop?
- Which trade-offs are we willing to make because of it?
Then make those rules tangible.
For example:
– We will not enter a market where we cannot maintain our service standards.
– We will accept slower short-term growth to keep our team size manageable and learning high.
– We will not tolerate behavior that undermines psychological safety, regardless of performance.
This is where culture starts to guide execution instead of marketing.
4. Align leadership behavior and people systems. People watch leaders more than they read values.
Ask yourselves as a leadership team:
- Where are we modelling the culture we say we want?
- Where are we clearly not?
- What is one visible behavior we can change together in the next 90 days?
Then connect that to your people systems.
Look at:
– Promotion criteria
– Performance reviews
– Reward structures
– Hiring and onboarding
If these systems do not support the culture you want, they will quietly protect the culture you have.
Where employer brand fits in
Employer branding often arrives late in this story. A campaign, a new careers site, a fresh tagline. The risk is that you end up promising a story the organization cannot deliver. A credible employer brand does something else. It holds up a mirror.
It asks:
- What is it really like to work here when it is good?
- Who thrives here and why?
- What trade-offs are we honest about?
When you express that truth with clarity, you do two things at once. You attract people who see themselves in the story. And you invite the organization to live up to the best of itself.
That is when culture, employer brand and strategy start to play the same melody, like sections of an orchestra working from one score.
One final question to leave you with:
If an outsider worked in your organization for 30 days, then read your strategy deck and your list of core values, would they relate them directly to your company?
If the honest answer is ‘not always’, that is not a failure.
It is a starting point.
